Confessions of a Home-based Business Entrepreneur

Google hasn’t had the best of press lately. In fact, it seems people are downright frustrated with them, myself included.

You may have noticed that HomeBusinessOnline.com went “grey barred” some weeks ago. Yep, ousted, de-indexed, banned from Google’s searches.

What?

How in the world could a 10-year old website — with an impeccable track record of providing a free service and information to visitors from all over the world — get banned? And, how could this happen in one day’s time with no warning whatseover?

Beats me to death.

But, we’re not alone. Go to the search engine forums and read page after page, sometimes as many as 50 pages per thread, about frustrated website owners in our same boat. There are plenty of theories floating around, some being pounded into the ground. But, when all is said and done, the fact is we still don’t know exactly why it happened. What triggered the ban? Was it an automatic ban by something in Google’s algorithm that triggered it? Or did Google’s human team find something they didn’t like and decide to ban the whole site?

Oh, I’m sure we’ve made mistakes along the way… unknowingly. I mean our website does have thousands of pages. It’s going to have some errors, even duplicate content in the shuffle of changing pages from HTML to PHP, or in trying to simplify content management. For this we get banned?

Go figure.

So what are we doing about it?

1) I’ve gone over our site with a fine-tooth comb and have removed ANYTHING that even LOOKED like it could be suspicious in any way to Google’s bots. We have never practiced ANY kind of questionable SEO tactics like hiding text or trying to trick the search engines. We’ve simply provided what our visitors wanted — solid information and resources for the small business entrepreneur who works out of his home.

2) After doing a site clean-up, I emailed Google and asked them to re-evaluate our website (about two weeks ago). Haven’t heard a word from them yet. I plan on emailing them again this evening. And, if I don’t hear from them within the next 48 hours, I’m going to email them again. I’ll keep doing this until I get a response. I’m disgusted with this horrible game we’re having to play with them.

3) I’ve been using my absolute favorite SEO software (see my forum post) to beef up our site and linking strategies. In fact, I’ve been using it almost daily for the past few weeks. Couldn’t do without it. If Google won’t let us into the dance, we can certainly position our website for plenty of other parties.

Meanwhile, Yahoo and other search engines (along with other inbound links and word of mouth) are still bringing us decent traffic. In fact, ironically, since Google abandonded us, our Adsense CTR’s have actually increased.

Hmmm, could it be that Yahoo, MSN and other search engines actually provide more targeted traffic than Google? You can bet I’ll be keeping a close eye. I’m all over this one.

I’d love nothing more than to have Google re-index us and give us back our rankings, and it might still happen. But, if they do, I’m certainly not going to waste useless time pining over how to remain indexed. I’ve learned too much in this process, one being that Google has competitors that can provide good traffic. Competition is a healthy thing.

No matter where this fiasco goes from here, one thing is for sure — No more benevolent Google. They’re making too many costly mistakes and are getting a big slap on the hands lately by the media and angry website owners.

No, No Google!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 17th, 2005 at 7:19 pm and is filed under Personal Ramblings, Things a Home Business Owner Should Know. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.