People looking for us on Google will once again note that we appear to have been zapped. Since the all-powerful Google don't do you the courtesy of telling you why you've been zapped you are then left trying to second guess from a list of several hundred possibilities at to what might have got Google's knickers in a twist this time.
Furthermore, Google don't respond individually to requests for re-indexing so if you make some changes to try and fix whatever it is you
think might have upset them and then request re-indexing and nothing happens, you are left no wiser. Anyway, here's my guess, and that's all it is, as to why Google have kicked us in the proverbial nuts
this time.
Some months ago, Google, in its infinite wisdom, decided to remove from its index all 11 million sites whose URLs ended in 'co.cc', including ours. They did this because a tiny fraction of the co.cc sites were found to contain naughty stuff, not naughty as in spank fiction, but naughty as in malware. This is the equivalent of blowing up the WHOLE of pakistan on the grounds that Osama Bin Laden might have been living in one single house there (insert appropriate name and country of your choosing).
I then made 2 requests to Google over a period of 4 months for our site to be re-indexed. This resulted in them sending the standard set of words they send each time you do this:
We've received a request from a site owner to reconsider how we index the following site:
http://www.spankinglibrary.co.cc/We'll review the site. If we find that it's no longer in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines, we'll reconsider our indexing of the site. Please allow several weeks for the reconsideration request. We do review all requests, but unfortunately we can't reply individually to each request.
... which means absolutely nothing. You then wait around for weeks/months to see if you've reappeared in their index or not.
Anyway, since people were having trouble finding us I set up another URL for the site:
http://www.spankinglibrary.tk/ and after a period of time that did start to appear in the Google indexes and people were able to find the site once again using relevant search terms. That was until a few days ago when, apart from certain keyword searches, I noticed we had been zapped out of existence again. You're then left to plough through a list containing literally hundreds of possibilities as to what Google law you have now broken, many of which are highly technical to comprehend, so your average site owner is really going to struggle.
In our case, and I'm simply guessing because in reality I have no idea, I believe that what has happened is that without us being notified Google suddenly started indexing our original URL once again (the co.cc one). Of course, I imagine we're then perceived as having two URLs pointing to the same content and consequently have a penalty placed on our ranking such that we're as good as invisible again. At this point things start to resemble a Monty Python sketch (in particular the one featuring the Piranha brothers). So, I'm sure Google didn't
want to nail our collective heads to the coffee table, but since we had transgressed their unwritten law we had to beg them to do it...
Long story short, I've put in place something called a 301 redirect so that anyone, including the PITA Googlebots, will get automatically redirected from the co.cc to the .tk URL for the site. Whether that makes a blind bit of difference only time will tell.
So, in conclusion, I would just like to take this opportunity to say, Google, index THIS!
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