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May 26, 2008

The Importance of Being Included in Google's Index

Last Friday, Google Analytics reported a surprisingly small number of visitors for this blog. According to Search Engine Roundtable, Google removed from the search results all the blogs hosted at blogspot.com and some of the .info domains for about 8 hours. It probably was an accident or a web spam filter that learns from my posts.


Many sites receives most of the traffic from search engines (especially from Google). Ryan Stewart's blog has been delisted from Google and he describes the consequences.
Yesterday was one of the scariest days I've had in a long time and it put in total perspective the power that Google wields. (...) I was working on a blog post and was searching for something I'd written before so that I could reference it. Instead of using my blog's search, I of course used Google's site feature, like I always do. Only this time, I got nothing. (...) I was confused, angry, and I felt completely helpless. Everyone uses Google. It was a big referrer to my blog and when I posted tips and tricks for Flash/Flex/AIR I did so knowing that someone could Google the problem and find my blog.

In his case, it wasn't Google's fault. "It turns out that Ryan's blog had been hacked, and Google does remove hacked sites from our index to protect our users," explains Matt Cutts. But whether a site is removed from Google's index accidentally or on purpose, it's interesting to quantify the importance of a popular search engine like Google for both users and publishers.

6 comments:

  1. It doesn't look like Ryan's resolved the blog hacking yet -- your link to his blog is redirecting to a search for "Tramadol" on a site that Google doesn't index.

    ReplyDelete
  2. No doubt its mighty Google after all.

    Thats why more then eighty percent of SEO today is centered around Google as the search engine and webmasters continue to work everyday to get their sites listed at a higher position in Google.

    ReplyDelete
  3. @Anonymous:
    I don't get any redirect in Firefox or IE, so there must be something wrong with your computer.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I'd have to agree with anonymous on this one.
    After clicking on the link to Ryan Stewart's blog i eventually got redirected to a 3rd party search engine i've never heard of (h**p://feed.doorfreehost.com/index.php?q=tramadol)
    Maybe you have the site or proper location of the site stored locally
    I Do not have any malware or adware on my computer and have never seen any results like this before- it is the site.

    (sorry if this is a double post, openid gave me some troubles)

    ReplyDelete
  5. After looking at the page in the google cache and getting a link form elsewhere, the link works like it should.....
    maybe he fixed it or maybe he's hosted across multiple server's / dns servers


    (maybe this time openid will work)

    ReplyDelete
  6. Without a pre-notification, such things could create panic for your site..Why my site is not coming. I guess there would be some kind of notifications by Google.

    ReplyDelete

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