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These complaints happen every day, actually; stop by the Google Webmaster Forum and pick one of the dozens threads accusing Google of arbitrarily penalizing or deindexing a site. They surface daily. Most of these complaints don’t get this kind of exposure, though.
The common theme in the majority of the complaints seems to be that webmasters haven’t looked at their site objectively in an effort to determine what they might have done to cause the issue. Often, the problems are obvious and fixable.
Sir Brian fell back several pages in the SERPs on August 13. Souter claimed that his site had “mysteriously disappeared,” but he still had 46 pages indexed, so he hadn’t been removed by Google.
Is it any coincidence that Google officially launched Panda internationally on August 12, the day before Sir Souter’s ranking dropped? I think not.
Until yesterday, you could find an exact duplicate of Souter’s site at www.briansouter.com.14feb-youth.com/; it was removed sometime overnight.
Image Credit: Attach Media
No one wants to hear it, I know, it’s cruel. But it is what it is. Souter’s site is clunky, old, and not user-friendly at all.
In the generation of me, what are you doing to attract me, your reader, to your site and make it easy for me to find what I’m looking for, Sir Brian?
You have all of this information about Stagecoach in different links within your Profile page, but I had no idea it was there until I actually visited the Profile page. A dropdown menu on the main navigation would give me some clue as to what your site contains and why I should want to stay and keep reading.
Your website isn’t a billboard; you can’t just stick it up and leave it for 10 years and hope for the best. Millions of others are making an effort to meet the needs of their audience and stay current.
The online landscape is constantly changing and webmasters have to make at least some semblance of an effort to keep up… even if they feel entitled because of who they are.
If your ranking has suddenly dropped or you believe it might have been removed from Google’s index, do at least the following things before throwing on your tinfoil hat and assuming the Intrawebz are out to get you:
Sir Brian Souter released a statement this morning asking webmasters to contact him if their sites have been blocked by Google, seemingly unaware that his own site, in fact, isn’t blocked at all. Is he ever in for a treat!
I suspect he’s about to get a flood of emails, 95 percent of which will be from webmasters whose sites were legitimately penalized or removed for things they could simply fix. It’s always easier to throw the problem in someone else’s lap than to admit that yes, your baby is, in fact, ugly.
Article by Miranda Miller from Search Engine Watch
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