The World’s Greatest Blog

This domain was today de-indexed by Google. And, surprisingly, that actually makes me happy!

As a full-time webmaster of more than four years, I’ve experienced the odd ‘Google blip’ along the way: I’m no stranger to reinclusion requests, largely due to the borderline black-hat techniques I employed back in the old days when I first started out (seriously, I do plead absolute ignorance in those naive times, though there are not many ‘tricks’ I can’t spot a mile off now as a result!).

However, today’s de-index was different. Okay, it followed a similar pattern – I noticed a drop off in incoming searches, did a couple of ’sure-thing’ searches for the domain name and other stuff for which I know we rank well, got worried, searched the URL… nothing… oh dear.

I went through bits of our site with a fine-toothed comb. Nothing even remotely shady. A few links to potential bad neighbourhoods (which I removed as a precaution) aside, it looked pretty good to me.

Then I flicked open Google Webmaster Tools. 1 New Message awaiting. The title? “Removal From google’s Index” it sounded worrying, so what did it contain?

While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages were using techniques that are outside our quality guidelines, which can be found here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html. This appears to be because your site has been modified by a third party. Typically, the offending party gains access to an insecure directory that has open permissions. Many times, they will upload files or modify existing ones, which then show up as spam in our index.The following is some example hidden text we found at http://24hourtrading.co.uk/:[TEXT REMOVED FOR (HOPEFULLY) OBVIOUS REASONS!]

[...]

In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, we have temporarily removed some of your webpages from our search results. Currently pages from 24hourtrading.co.uk are scheduled to be removed for at least 30 days.

We would prefer to have your pages in Google’s index. If you wish to be reconsidered, please correct or remove all pages (may not be limited to the examples provided) that are outside our quality guidelines. One potential remedy is to contact your web host technical support for assistance. For more information about security for webmasters, see http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/09/quick-security-checklist-for-webmasters.html.

When you are ready, please visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reinclusion?hl=en to learn more and submit your site for reconsideration.

Sincerely,

Google Search Quality Team

This is cast iron and certain proof of their rationale behind our site’s removal – someone has added some spam links. I cannot say how pleased I was that Google had the decency and courtesy to report this to me, and how much time and heart-ache this has saved me.

I’m particularly happy about the phrase “We would prefer to have your pages in Google’s index” - whether this message be automated or otherwise, what better clarification that, other than the offending spam (now removed and – hopefully – never to return following the whole site’s removal to our bomb-proof dedicated servers).

Such an attack has happened to us before. In fact, I do believe I blogged about it back then too (however now I really am going to move this domain to a new server – I’m doing it as I type this!). We had no such report from Google then.

I have often lamented our seemingly cut-off status, being at best a moderately sized web-business, based quite comically in the middle of nowhere in the Yorkshire Dales National Park (UK – the picture to the right are our nearest neighbours) – Silicon Valley this ain’t. Google, for me, have always appeared a slightly celestial organisation, with whom I gathered a personal contact of this nature was unlikely. How wrong I was.

This type of transparency is what we webmasters have long been crying out for from Google, and in my view goes beyond what we might legitimately expect from them in terms of contact and explaining their actions (after all, they don’t really have to explain themselves to me at all!).

So, here is a big thank you to Google for this thoughtful message.

Lessons to be learned from today’s experience:

• Don’t leave your small website on shared hosting where it is open to such spam attacks;
• Use Google’s Webmaster Tools and Sitemaps;
• Check Google’s Webmaster Tools as soon as your website has been deindexed;
• Fix your website and file a reinclusion request.

Its not imperative that we have any search presence at all with this domain as we only really run this blog and our business homepages here – and I’m currently spread so thinly that I couldn’t take on any more business as it is. However, this is the World’s Greatest Blog, so clearly that needs to be fully Googlable.

Of course, my reinclusion request is in Google’s inbox right now, and in it, I actually used the phrase “a big thumbs up from both of us at 24 Hour Trading” for that is what Google deserve.