Google truly is fickle
If you read any blog or website that focuses on search engine optimization, you consistently come across stories of websites that basked in Google’s sunlight only to wither and die when they were suddenly downgraded or shunned from its index.
As someone who has operated a website for years, I know first-hand how fickle Google can be. As I documented previously, Bloggasm was completely wiped off the web for several hours the other day because my account with my server had been suspended. They had been sending me emails to an address I never check telling me I was overusing my bandwidth and if I didn’t upgrade,they’d have to take down my site. Luckily, I was able to get hold of a sales representative fairly quickly and begrudgingly agreed to pay more in monthly fees to host my site.
My site went back online that same day, but I immediately noticed a huge drop in traffic, particularly traffic coming from Google. Well, today I decided to do some Google searches for some of my most popular articles, and as I expected, I found them to be harshly diminished within the Google index. To give you an idea of the severity — several of the websites that popped up first were blog posts that were linking to my blog post.
So what does this mean? It means that articles that I spent sometimes hours working on — articles that gathered dozens of links from other websites — barely rank at all on Google. Hell, even a search for my name doesn’t even put this website at the top. Because my website was down for less than 24 hours, I’m now looking at decreased traffic and decreased potential ad revenue.
It’s times like these that you wonder if the hours you put into a blog are really worth it. I can only hope that in the coming weeks those blog posts that collected so many links will slowly be re-indexed in such a way so that they actually get the page rank they deserve.
Considering I do search engine optimization for a living, I think this is a fine opportunity to repay the help you gave me a few weeks ago.
I ran some preliminary checks on your website. Your code’s fine. I know your posts, so I don’t think any of your outbound links would be causing problems. However, when I browse to your site as Googlebot, I get a 412 error.
To see what I mean, install the Firefox User Agent Switcher extension and import this user agent list into it. Then, select Tools -> User Agent Switcher -> Googlebot 2.1 (New Version). This basically tells any website you visit that you’re Googlebot and to display the requested page as such. SEO experts use it to make sure you’re site isn’t cloaking.
It’s likely the problem has something to do with your switch in hosting service. You should contact your web host ASAP to get it corrected. After Google hasn’t been able to see your site for awhile, it might drop it from the index altogether.
I hope this helps. Don’t hesitate to ask if you need any more assistance.
Another important thing you can do to verify that this is indeed the problem Google is encountering is to set up your site on Google Webmaster Tools. Once you’ve verified ownership of the site, you should be able to see any crawl errors in explicit detail. In general, Google does a wonderful job of communicating with webmasters about their site’s status in their index; you just have to know where to look.
Don’t worry, I’ve got you bookmarked.
i am glad to see you have other faithful readers looking out for you. i hope stephen’s suggestions help!
Thanks guys for all the help and support.