One Man Band

…does your business still exist?

An article by Jason Prescott at iMedia Connection describes “Google Hell,” when a website is shuffled off to Google’s supplemental index for undisclosed reasons and for an indeterminate time. The result? The website vanishes from Google search results.

Shows what I know. I didn’t know a Google supplemental index exists.

However, I recently suffered what I’ll call “Google Limbo,” and Google was only tangentially to blame.

Beginning the first week of June, I noticed visits and page views at my website nosing down after month-to-month increases sustained over a year and a half.

I kept poking around, becoming more alarmed as the stats headed south along with my site’s traffic-driven income.

By the middle of the month, I was getting no referrals from Google. In contrast, prior months showed Google as hands-down the highest-in-number referring website.

I finally tracked the problem to a robots.txt file in my website’s root directory that denied access to the site for Googlebot. I hadn’t put it there, and the protections showed the owner as root.

When I complained to my hosting service, I was told that automatic software had created the file because my website was being crawled too frequently! That exclamation point was earned by my hosting service because I received no notification of the problem prior to incurring blunt-force trauma to my online presence.

I went to Google’s webmaster tools section and clicked the box to to request lower-frequency crawls.

The robots.txt file was removed by system staff, but it took three weeks for my website traffic to recover.

Here are my take-aways from this episode:

• Watch your website stats and investigate aberrations.

• Be familiar with the content of your web directories beyond html. What you don’t know about can kill your online presence.

• Don’t rely on your hosting service to be on your side, or make decisions in your best interest. Holler if wounded.

• Have more than one online presence. While my website was tanking, I still received income from other sites, including my Café Press shop, my Squidoo Lenses, my microstock portfolios at Bigstockphoto and iStock, and a recently set up Associate-o-Matic Amazon shop.