Google Removed me From the Index and It's Like I don't Exist

A Blogger's Fractured Fairy Tale

Don't you hate blog entries about blogging. Yea, me too, but this is a sad tale, one that must be told, the story of a man and his blog and a powerful search engine and beast called Jagger.

Once upon a time, I had a blog (I still do). I wrote in it, cultivated it, marketed it, and it was good. I monitored its traffic statistics and watched my blog traffic grow and develop and I was proud of my little blog. After some years and considerable effort, I was getting over 300 visitors a day, then one day several weeks ago, the unthinkable happened. When it seemed that I was moving toward my best day ever, the traffic came to a grinding halt.

I couldn't understand what happened, but I watched with horror as the numbers dropped day by agonizing day from 350 to 210 to 128 and most recently around 50 unique visitors per day. It seems the problem was related somehow to Google, the mightiest of mighty search engines. You see, my traffic was driven mostly by searches, and more than 95 percent all search came from Google. I checked my search engine traffic statistics and sure enough, my Google traffic had dropped dramatically.

Frantically, with sweaty palms and a heavy heart, I opened Google and entered my name. In the past, my blog appeared in the top three. Today, it was nowhere to be found. It seems, the powerful and mighty Google had removed me from its index. And when you are not in Google, as I found out, it's like you don't exist (in blogging terms anyway).

But I was not ready to give up. I searched for others who might share my plight and sure enough, I found kindred spirits who had been removed from the Google ranks. It seems a beast with the name Jagger, the updated Google ranking algorithm, had been unleashed onto the unsuspecting web world about the same time as my problems started. And mine was not the only blog or web site to be caught in the change.  Desperate and not knowing what else to do, I re-entered the name of my blog in the Google index and I waited for my rank to return.

I wrote to contacts I have at Google and was told it could be as long as 8 weeks before my rank returned to its previous status (if in fact it ever does).

So I keep posting, virtually alone now in the blogging wilderness, hoping against hope, as I wait for my traffic to return to its former glory. Whether it will, I know not, and for now I sit, at the mercy of a mighty search engine and its beast named Jagger.

2/19/07 See my "happy ending."

Comments

[tish grier]

ah! the vagaries of Google!

one of my blogs doesn't come up in google search all that much because it's the second blog on a single Blogger account. Seems that Google looks at more than one blog on a Blogger account with a bit of suspicion (unless you give it its own non-blogspot url.) My first blog, however, only gets increased traffic when I post daily. Apparently, when I post daily, Google knows I'm alive.

Otherwise, I'm not existent...

Google's a whacky system to say the least. Good luck dealing with it :-)

___

Hi:
Thanks for writing.

Yea, I've taken to trying other methods. I sent my two OS X tricks posted over the last couple of days to Mac Surfer and I got my best hits ever, over 700 yesterday, but today I'm back down to earth again. Sending links to sites that increase traffic is a great way to generate traffic in the short term, but people use search engines to find it once it grows a bit older.

If my Google traffic ever comes back, combined with my new method, I might have something here.

Thanks again for writing.

RM

[Michelle Shelton]

OMG...this happened to me yesterday. I am looking for everything to see "why" they removed me. I am a real estate agent and this site has been my baby since 2004 and I have climbed the indexing. I am in the #1 or #2 position at all times and I get about 10 quality leads a day...until this week.
I don't know what I did. I am going to check out jagger and see...thanks for the post...it was helpful!
Michelle Shelton
www.askmichelleshelton.com

[Ron Miller]

This happened to me in 2007, Michelle, so I doubt it has anything to with adjustments made to the algorithm that far back in time, but it could have something to do with more recent adjustments. Good luck.

Ron