Soooooooooooo, I found out why my site vaporized off of Google! On my webhosting account through dreamhost, I found a lovely .htaccess at my root directory, but not my website root directory. I opened this evil file and found the specific ingredients to block googlebot. The problem is, who put this file there?
I’m looking into if the server has been hacked, or if there is a crazy admin….ugh….1-2 weeks of total annihilation on my SEO…total bummer!
I’m hopeful I also didn’t get struck with the recent Google algorithm changeover. Literally, over night, and with a subtle change to Google’s algorithm, entire businesses could go under I’m convinced.
Did you see this? http://blog.dreamhost.com/2007/08/10/the-internet-is-not-for-people/
Heh! But also there are other people like me who saw their PR increased and are happy about this :p
That is good then…I’m just really bummed that my site tanked so bad on the searches…there are a lot of new Jon Phillips that are cropping up in searches, so its war!!!
Jon: sorry to hear an accidental htaccess killed your SEO, that must really feel pretty crappy. Just know, I’m at least one person feeding off your RSS. Best of luck from Sydney!
Cool…thanks man! Things are looking up now, but it looks like it was an ACCIDENT by dreamhost…needless to say, do you or anyone else have a recommendation for better hosting?
Oddly, while I saw some PR stuff go up in the last TBPR export, since Friday, my traffic has been down on some sites that had their pageranks go up, higher on some others where pagerank was flat or dropped.
The pagerank you display in the Google Toolbar or other pagerank checkers is a snapshot from a certain point in time, but the actual pagerank that Google uses to calculate your placement in SERPs (which is what really matters in terms of getting traffic) is recalculated regularly. Basically, the pagerank that’s being displayed for your site(s) is already out of date.
Basically, pagerank and the like are way too powerful to be closed…we need to have universal sharing rights!
Google is updating very quicly these days i think your fix will get it back in the index very quickly. You might have to wait a few months for Google to start feeding those Green Pixels to the PR indicator becasue thats updated every few months.
You might also want to see if some links are coming in from Bad Neighborhoods.
Might want to consider a Reconsideration Request http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35843 even thou there is no penalty.
I think everyting will be 100% soon
If your business depends on google, then you shouldn’t take chances: buy ads now! In the best case it means your name is seen more than once near the top of the page, once in results, and once in ads. In the worst case, at least you are sure everyone will see your site after the algorithm moves you off the front page.
Cool…need to add to some of my project