Tag Archives: Google Webmaster Tools

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Giving a Talk on Fighting Site Abuse at the NAGW National Conference

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DSC_0724 I’ll be traveling to St. Louis this week for the National Association of Government Webmasters 2010 Conference. I’m giving a presentation there on Fighting Site Abuse with Webmaster Tools. It should be fun – I have a lot of info to share and some (hopefully) interesting demos to show everyone along the way.

I’m also very excited to talk to as many webmasters of government sites as possible over the course of the conference. We try to serve everyone who builds and maintains websites but I worry that we hear more from SEO-knowledgeable commercial sites than government, non-profit, and small business sites. I can’t wait to get more perspectives on how Google can help them, what their major challenges are, and even what their goals are in building sites. If you’re going to be there, feel free to chat with me.

If you can’t make it to St. Louis this week, and aren’t a webmaster for a government site, no worries – much of my material comes from Google Help Center articles and Webmaster Central blog posts that you can read right now:

On a personal note, it will be great to get back to the midwest again.

How my site disappeared from Google search

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Seen my personal blog lately? Probably not, if you were searching via Google. Major sections of my site have been disappearing from the search index over the past three weeks. My homepage, my blog and many of the most recent articles on it no longer showed up in result pages. I’m no Matt Cutts, but I get a fair number of people coming to my site when searching for info about Google search, avoiding scams, and how to name their baby. All that traffic has been slipping away.

You can probably imagine how you would feel if this was happening to you. Does Google hate me? Was my site hacked? What do I do, and how much will it cost to get this fixed?

I will answer all of those questions, starting with the first:

My site is falling out of the index, does Google hate me?

Probably not. My situation is actually pretty illustrative – I’m pretty sure Google doesn’t hate me and isn’t unfairly slapping my site down because, well, I work at Google.

That’s right, Google was kicking pages from one of its own employees out of search results. I’m sure I’m not the first. Google doesn’t treat my site any differently than anyone else’s. BTW, standard disclaimers apply to this post.

So I knew there was probably a logical reason for the dropped pages, which brings me to the next question:

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Great video on how to get your site back in Google

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Earlier I wrote a bit about what to do when your site has been hacked or spammed to the point where Google and Firefox start warning visitors away from your site.  If you find you site deleted from Google search results completely, you’ll want to file a reconsideration request.

Luckily, the Google Webmaster Central blog has a great post on how to make a request to get back into Google.  The post includes a step-by-step video.  You can also check out the Google Webmaster Help group if you have questions.