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”.

Actually, this is four days spanning a weekend, so, technically, two BUSINESS days. I applied for reconsideration on Friday, and billcammack.com appears in Google’s search results as of Tuesday morning. Rather commendable, IMO. :D I don’t know the way any of this works, but this may be the first spider crawl of my site since I sent in the request, informing them that I had removed the text that got my site removed in the first place. That’s exactly how I think it should be done. Not some kind of immediate reinstatement process, just “Please check again on your next crawl. I’ve fixed the problem. Thanks”.

Before I went to sleep last night, I had noticed I started getting hits from Google, but my site itself wasn’t available. Hopping out of bed just now, I noticed lots more Google hits and checked “Bill Cammack” and “Bill”, and I was back in position.

As far as I can tell, the “Google Search Quality” system worked fairly and swiftly in this situation, and I really couldn’t ask for more. :)

Having said that, living without my > 1,000 pages being searchable on Google for ~ 4 days, when being indexed in Google has been “a part of my life” every day for the last two years has prompted me to consider some new things when it comes to “site promotion” and “viewer/reader awareness”.

The first thing I’m going to do is start a mailing list. My Cousin Richard has wanted to start up a RealFans.TV mailing list for the longest, but I felt that we were doing enough with our community site and our Facebook Group. During this “Google search blackout” for my site, I supplemented my usual traffic by informing people directly via social media outlets when I posted something new. I figured that instead of sending random updates to places, I’d do like Chris Brogan and Jason Calacanis and create my own email list. This way, searchable or not, I have a way to quickly inform people who are interested about what’s new with the site, what’s “old” that I’d like to bring back to people’s attention or what’s coming up in the future.

I also need to build a static section to my site which is representative of more than my video editing work. While it was good to have my resume and my Flickr set still available, it really was a vastly incomplete representation of my internet presence.

Anyway… I’m satisfied (not that that’s important :) ) with my Google disappearance/reappearance experience. I think the process worked fairly and efficiently, and I’m REALLY GLAD it didn’t take WEEKS, as they mentioned in their correspondence. Not because I NEED to be indexed in Google, but because I’m used to it, and it was a strange feeling for the last couple of days, posting stuff that I knew wasn’t going to be indexed.

Well… On With The Show! :D

back story: 1) “What if YOU get removed from Google?”
back story: 2) “Whose Fault Is This?”

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Such an interesting day… suddenly… :D

… At some point this morning, I went to check on my Google status.

The way I do that is to Google the word “Bill” or the word “bill”.

On November 12, 2007, I was on page 4: (#37 of 41,600,000 English pages for “Bill”)

On February 15, 2008, I was on page 1: (#10 of 42,000,000 English pages for “Bill”)

On April 20, 2008, I was STILL on page 1: (#3 of 29,700,000 English pages for “Bill”)

Now, I could have taken a screenshot every single day, if I gave a damn, because I haven’t been outside of the top ten results for “Bill” or “bill” for the last five (5) months. In fact, everybody KNOWS that, because I don’t carry business cards. I just tell people to “Google Bill”.

So anyway, hahahaha :D I google my first name, and interestingly enough, I’m not on page 1. I look at the number of entries and notice that it’s ballooned to 395,000,000 English pages.

So I’m like, ok. So what? This is interesting. For once, I get to see myself on page 2. When they get rid of those extra couple of hundred MILLION results, I’ll be back in position.

Nope! :D

Page 3?… 4?… 11?….. Nothing. :D

So now, I’m getting suspicious, so I start googling stuff that I *KNOW* I’m on page 1 for, such as “Bill Cammack” and the first thing that comes up is my Flickr set. :/

Photo by Jonathan Dingman

So now I’m like “oh. I see. My entire DOMAIN NAME has disappeared from Google”. :/ So then I did this search:

and received this: :D

And… Yes… I tried it in “all languages” too, as if I EVER post in anything except English.

Now…

I don’t know anything about how sites disappear/reappear in Google’s results. This Page gives Google’s explanation of what could happen to YOUR site:

Also, as I mentioned, there are usually tens of millions of English pages for “Bill” and today, there are hundreds of millions, almost ten times the usual number. However, that makes no difference, because my site is currently not indexed by google AT ALL, as if it never existed. :D

Now… Rewind a couple of days… On July 16, 2008, I was experimenting with Google Ads and wrote a post about it, so the two things that came to mind were that a) someone tampered with my site, or b) I messed something up when I added and then deleted my Google Ads within like two days, because they totally weren’t floating my boat. As I was discussing this with Tyme, she mentioned that my site might have been removed for some sort of Adsense violation. Googling removal situations, I landed on a page that said they usually send out some sort of explanation if they remove you themselves……

So I go to my junk mail folder, and lo and behold, there’s an email from “Google Search Quality”, which read:

Dear site owner or webmaster of billcammack.com,

While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages were using techniques that are outside our quality guidelines, which can be found here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html. This appears to be because your site has been modified by a third party. Typically, the offending party gains access to an insecure directory that has open permissions. Many times, they will upload files or modify existing ones, which then show up as spam in our index.

The following is some example hidden text we found at billcammack.com:

and went on to describe the offending text.

Interestingly enough, I received this email on July 17, 2008, less than a day after my Google Ads post. When I mentioned this to Tyme, she pointed me to a post she recently made on her 9rules blog, called Securing Your WordPress Site. Thanks to Tyme’s post, which cited this article by Brajeshwar, which describes how he found foreign code in his site’s header file, I figured out what had happened.

Sure Enough… a simple “View Page Source” revealed that my site had been ‘infected’ with “hidden” text when I searched for one of the words that Google informed me was on my site. I switched themes, upgraded WordPress and did a couple of other things to prepare to “request reconsideration” of my site for indexing in Google’s search results.

I did that today, June 18, 2008, and we’ll see how long it takes, since this is what’s written on the reconsideration request page:

Please allow several weeks for the re-evaluation process. Unfortunately, we can’t reply individually to reconsideration requests.

So this got me thinking….

Can YOU afford for your site to be removed from Google’s search results? Would that impact your business? Would it impact your social life? Would it impact your ‘cred’?

Personally, I don’t need google for business. I don’t need google for socialization. I am a REAL PERSON who does work for REAL COMPANIES and has REAL FRIENDS that I hang out with, regardless of whether my site is indexed in Google. The hits that I get from Google are all *RANDOMS*. The people that are wondering what Bill Cammack did last night or last week are either SUBSCRIBED to my site via RSS or have billcammack.com in their favorites or bookmarks somewhere. Being on Page 1 on Google for “Bill” is strictly a NOVELTY for me, because….. I never even BRANDED “Bill”. :D People ask me all the time, “What did you do to get to page 1 for ‘Bill’?”, and I can’t tell them, because all I did was POST. INTERESTING. ISH, like this post you’re reading right now. Granted, I can’t/won’t take credit for the popularity of my site, because other than Google (which, according to Google Analytics accounts for accountED for 56.04% of my page hits) I get a lot of referral traffic from people like Richard Blakeley & Lux Alptraum of Boinkology.com.

So, like I said in my posts about Fame and “Star Power”, I couldn’t possibly give a damn about people that I don’t know at all googling some topic that I happened to have posted about and enriching their own lives by reading what *I* wrote. :D Therefore, it doesn’t matter to me AT ALL, that according to Google right now, my site doesn’t even exist.

But what about you?

What would happen to YOUR business if Google suddenly didn’t see your site?
What would happen to YOUR standing in your field amongst people that don’t know your CV yet?
What happens if nobody can google YOUR company and see years worth of posts and videos and pictures and awards and accolades and recommendations?

I have over 1,000 posts on BillCammack.com that are currently absolutely ****ing INVISIBLE on Google. It’s funny, :) because this is such an odd feeling that I can’t really explain it. :D It’s relatively unique. It’s like the world suddenly caught amnesia when it comes to anything you’ve said or done over the past umpteen years.

The closest I can come to explaining it is… We’ve all seen what happens when Twitter fails.

What happens if Google fails YOU?

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