Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Feeling that Google Search Love Again

If you've been following, I've had some trouble with Google de-indexing me--even though, as I reviewed my stats this a.m., I'm back in Google. Apparently, I'm among good company in the de-listing: Deborah Ng penned this post at About.com on her own de-listing from Google, and what it took to get back in.

Jordan McCollum at Marketing Pilgrim offers very good advice for Blogger users on the mattter. Jordan explains a little quirk that's occured to some Blogger templates in the conversion over to Google/Blogger that could only happen when a site is run by bots rather than by people--thus causing many of us some serious headaches:the problem, or some of it, being in Blogger's <$BlogMetaData$> element...

And here's another good look at what sometimes happens with Google from Your SEO Plan. This article explains how websites in general--not just blogs-- get dropped or banned from Google. This advice is great to know overall, even if it isn't specific to the quirks resulting from the Google-Blogger merger.

Ultimately, it's up to us bloggers (and web designers) to keep an eye on what's going on with our sites via our stats. For many bloggers, our reps are contingent on our blog's searchability, and with Google being pretty much everyone's default search engine, it is exteremly important that our blogs are part of Google (as much as they are part of Technorati, which via its rankings, bestows a degree of trackable credibility on our blogs.)

So, for now, I seem to be back in Google. I will admit that I was feeling a tad cresfallen--"what's the use of blogging if no one can find me?"--and just wasn't feeling much like posting. Things have improved...

Although I'm beginning to wonder about my feed...and if it's time to burn a new one.

just a thought...

, , , ,

2 comments:

Elaine Vigneault said...

Interesting post. All blacklists contain innocent people. It's just a shame because there's so much spam and scarping going on that something has to be done, but when lists are employed like this some good always gets mixed in with the bad... Hope you can get off the blacklist.

Tish Grier said...

Hi Elaine....as of today, I'm back in Google. Did a search both under my name and under "constant observer" and came up fine. It wasn't blacklisting inasmuch as a foul-up in the conversion from Blogger to GoogleBlogger. Jordan's post explains the situation very well. Now I'm just looking forward to showing up in Techmeme again :-)