Scenario: (Happened recently to a Pure Visibility client.)
Your company has some nice blogging momentum going. You’ve been posting on the regular for about a year now, not quite in Jonathan Schwartz territory yet, but it’s going well. Then one day your Internet marketing company notices that none of your posts are indexed by Google…tried querying Google with the advanced operator site:example.website.com and your blog is nowhere. The Horror!
Here’s what happened behind the scenes.
- A security flaw in an outdated version of Wordpress allows spam to get to the blog, even though comments are moderated.
- A spider sees the spam and Google removes the blog from its index
- Spam content deleted, Wordpress updated with security flaw corrected.
- Blog remains de-indexed.
- Verified site with Google Webmaster Tools & receive notice of Removal from Google’s Indexes
- Use Webmaster Tools to submit Request Consideration form.
- Within the week (much sooner than expected) the site is reindexed by Google.
- Problem! SERP snippet now shows spam that no longer exists on the blog.
Nice that Webmaster Tools allows Google to communicate with site owners and provide them with critical notifications. This could be pretty frustrating for anyone, particularly someone limited time or intarweb experience. Takeaways: keep your blogging program up to date; use Akismet or other anti-spam tool; moderate comments vigilantly; sign up for Webmaster Tools.
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