Comments on: What if YOU get removed from Google?

By: Bill Cammack Retires From The Google / Stats Game | Bill Cammack

Bill Cammack Retires From The Google / Stats Game | Bill Cammack — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 13:27:16 +0000

[...] blogged about this situation in: 1) What if YOU get removed from Google? 2) Whose Fault Is This? (UnGoogled Blog Day 03)? 3) Google restores Bill Cammack site (UnGoogled [...]

By: Google Doesn’t Hate ALL Paid Links, Just Yours

Google Doesn’t Hate ALL Paid Links, Just Yours — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 13:40:14 +0000

[...] it slightly ironic that Google will drop some sites completely out of the rankings if they have erroneously hacked links or absolutely nothing wrong with their site, but for a site that is clearly stating that they are [...]

By: Google restores Bill Cammack site (UnGoogled Blog Day 04) | Bill Cammack

Google restores Bill Cammack site (UnGoogled Blog Day 04) | Bill Cammack — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 10:56:02 +0000

[...] Giving credit where it’s due, “Google Search Quality” has restored BillCammack.com by July 22, 2008, less than four (4) days after I cleaned up the infected section of my site and sent in my “reconsideration request”. [...]

By: Whose Fault Is This? (UnGoogled Blog Day 03) | Bill Cammack

Whose Fault Is This? (UnGoogled Blog Day 03) | Bill Cammack — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 02:14:22 +0000

[...] “Mark” had some interesting comments about my post “What if YOU get removed from Google?”. I thought I’d take a minute [...]

By: Bill Cammack

Bill Cammack — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 20:28:54 +0000

@Mark: Of course this is my “fault”, for not watching out and taking precautions. Competely agreed.

My point here isn’t to say “look what Google did to me, waaaaaaaah :( “. My point here is that just like it happened to ME, it can happen to THE NEXT MAN or THE NEXT WOMAN. Period. And when/if it does… How is that going to affect YOUR business?

I disagree with your statement that “Every serious business owner blah blah blah”, because it should read “Every Nerd-Ass Geek Business Owner who cares about the inner workings of WordPress or whatever platform their site is built on and cares to learn about how to maintain and defend their site backs up his or her site daily and watches the WP dashboard for news.”.

That’s part of my point. There are lots of people who have no reason whatsoever to visit the WP dashboard (meaning /wp-admin/index.php ) because they use favorites to access the pages they need… write post, edit theme, manage posts, etc. I’m now aware, and I think other people need to be MADE aware that if they don’t keep up with these day-to-day announcements and updates (as you’re suggesting), then this exact same thing can happen to them.

Another take-away from this situation is that if YOU don’t want to handle site security, maybe you should HIRE SOMEONE who wants to spend THEIR time making sure your site isn’t tampered with.

So, no… I’m not hanging anything on Google YET. I agree that it’s a reasonable rule not to index infected sites. Let’s see how long it takes them after I submitted my “I fixed the problem” notice (July 18, 2008) to check the site, see that the problem was dealt with and either replace my site in the google listings or not.

Actually, the “fault” for the takedown isn’t really the main thing… It’s the ABILITY. I’m sure anyone can press a button and remove a site from Google if they feel like it. Now that I’ve had a site disappear entirely out of the listings, I’m aware of what that feels like, and I’m not sure that building a web presence that’s archived to an incredibly high degree ONLY BY GOOGLE is in my best interests or anyone else’s.

At this point, it’s the only game in town.

Thanks for the comment.