The Frustration Continues

In a few seconds you can find the 2nd male lead from an obscure 60s sitcom. Are there facts more esoteric or more well hidden?

Oh Google, you’re like a god to me.

No, seriously. For this and most other websites, Google controls who lives and dies. Isn’t that part of God’s job description?

Google drives the Internet. The percentage of Internet hits that can be directly credited to Google is mind boggling. Google has made finding the obscure simple.

The whole concept is Earth changing. Think about it. In a few seconds you can find the 2nd male lead from an obscure 60s sitcom. Are there facts more esoteric or more well hidden? Without Google (and to a much lesser extent, the other search engines), there’d be no way to find them.

Unfortunately, that means when you’re on Google’s shit list, you’ve got real Internet trouble.

Five months or so since hackers broke into this site, I still feel the results. My traffic is way off. Today is a good day and it’s about half of what it was.

I’m no more self absorbed and boring than I was five months ago. It’s got to be their fault!

Even today, Google’s webmaster tools tell me geofffox.com’s most important keywords are:

1. crack

2. serial

3. key

4. torrent

5. code

6. mp3

7. keygen

Those words have been gone since January!

Google is a lot slower than you’d think. Pages are indexed quickly (I have posted an entry and found it on Google 20 minutes later), but integrating data from a site into more complex search results takes time. And as its computers decide how to value what I’ve written, Google’s opinion of me reflects its mistaken belief I’m some sort of outlaw.

It might have been worse. Since the break-in this blog has been more finely tuned to reflect what Google expects from a valuable site. Over the long run, that should matter for something.

I’m not sure why traffic is important to me, but it is. My income from this site is pennies a day. Actually, revenue has fallen much faster than traffic, an understandable effect of fewer search engine referrals.

Bottom line, the whole hassle since January continues and continues to be frustrating.

6 thoughts on “The Frustration Continues”

  1. My point is, their systems aren’t as tightly integrated and don’t perform as quickly as you might think. It surprised me. It’s a heck of a task as Google basically caches the entire Internet on multiple servers.

  2. As a website designer, Google affects my life on a daily basis.

    Google indexes a site in a few different ways.

    First, it goes page by page, and indexes that content on a standalone basis. Basically, it records the text of the page only.

    Second, it indexes the entire site as an aggregate listing. The larger the site, the longer this takes. This is where the infamous google algorithm comes into play, where external links, page titles, etc. are calculated into the site ranking and it’s position in organic search results.

    I’m oversimplifying this, but that’s how I explain it to my clients.

    When I optimize small sites, 15 pages or less, it takes google about 30 days to fully index the site.

    Over 60 days ago, I created and optimized a site that has around 150 pages, and so far, the aggregate indexing hasn’t occurred. The larger the site, the longer it takes.

    This site has thousands of pages, I’m not surprised it has gone this long.

  3. Hi Geoff, one way to find out if there’s a reason for those terms in your search results is to use a site:-query, for example:

    http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ageofffox.com+torrent+mp3

    In this case, I came across URLs such as https://www.geofffox.com/gallery/search.php?searchstring=truck

    https://www.geofffox.com/gallery/UCONN-2004-parade/ey

    I think you’ll agree that with content like that on your site, Google will generally continue to associate those terms with it. What you can do is to clean up those pages and work on a way to prevent that from happening again (it looks like a spammer just tried to leave links to his own site, which didn’t work; so you could perhaps add a CAPTCHA to prevent that).

    In general, once they’re cleaned up, Google will update the index over time. If you want to speed that up, you could either have those pages removed from the index for the moment (using a “noindex” robots meta tag, perhaps combined with Webmaster Tools) or submit a Sitemap file to tell us that the content on those URLs has changed.

    Hope it helps!

  4. Hi John-

    Thanks for your comment. Obviously, some things get by. I had cleaned up those areas, but must have missed those entries.

    It’s an older version of Gallery which can’t easily be upgraded to something more suitable for this untrustworthy era. All new comments have been turned off for a while.

    However, you’re talking a very few entries over 14,000+ pages. And, the spammy keywords outrank words which are much more often mentioned on the site.

    No site, even Google’s sites, is perfect. I’m trying as hard as I can.

    AFAIK, in my nearly 4,000 blog entries, there are no spammy comments.

    Thanks for commenting.

    Geoff Fox

    (I have fixed the links John sent)

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