Google Doesn't Love Me Anymore

Nov 24, 2007

In order to "blogify" this site and make it possible for people to comment, some time ago I installed WordPress blog software to a subdirectory (/comments) and began linking my articles over there so that visitors could leave comments, blog style.

A day or two before I left Italy for India, I had to change the WordPress theme because I messed up the old one. I hadn't yet got around to adding back all the bits and pieces or really setting it up the way I wanted it - I'm not a programmer by any stretch of the imagination, and it takes some coding skills to make changes to a blog theme.

A few days after arriving at Woodstock, I noticed that the Google search on my site was no longer working. I didn't have time to think about it, and a casual search on the issue didn't turn up much info. Maybe it was some sort of cacheing problem? I'd been having trouble with Woodstock's internet connections - because I no longer have a WS login (Steve, where are you when I need you?) I only have guest access, which causes various quirky problems. For all I knew, this might be one of them.

As I began an analysis of Woodstock's website preparatory to making marketing recommendations, I discovered in Google webmaster tools that my own site had been deindexed - I am no longer listed by Google, so if you search for, say, Italian slang or Woodstock School, you will no longer find me.

My crime was that my site had been found to harbor hidden text - a bunch of pornographic keywords hidden in the code (not visible on any page) that I certainly had not put in there. (Had I included those words as part of the site's visible text, this would have been perfectly fine with Google - how else do all those porn sites stay in business?)

The message from Google was not helpful in explaining which of this long list of phrases was actually on my site, nor what pages they had been found on. But the date of the deindexing - November 14th - coincided suspiciously with the date I had changed the WordPress theme. Sure enough, looking at the code of the comments pages showed some gratuitous nastiness embedded into the theme.

Either the theme itself (which I got from WordPress' themes index) was pre-hacked, or coincidentally someone hacked the site at the same time. I hoped that changing the theme would get rid of the malicious text, but it did not. I don't have time or energy to troubleshoot this right now, so for the time being all I can do is remove comments completely.

I have made a request for reinstatement to Google; their boilerplate reply says that this could take "several weeks." Evidently any single site, out of the millions (billions?) they index, is not that important. I can understand their difficulty in keeping up with it all, but it's annoying to be penalized for something that was not my fault in the first place. If their robots were more sophisticated, they might have figured out that a site like mine - which has always played strictly by the rules and was doing very nicely, thank you, had no need to suddenly resort to black-hat methods.

It's a good thing I don't rely on the income from this site (averaging around $600 per month recently), because it's going to dip severely - traffic to my site is down by 75%.

Oh, well, no use crying over spilt websites. This will be an opportunity to see how much real traffic I get from the faithful admirers who find my site via bookmarks and RSS feeds, as opposed to hit-and-run Google searches. Wish me luck, and tell your friends about me - they won't find me via Google!

Nov 26, 2007

Good news! The Google team are much faster than they state, and have already reinstated my site as of the 24th - only three days after my request for reinstatement. Traffic is coming back up, thanks in part to being featured in The Humanist Symposium yesterday.