Blacklisted by Google?

Although I write my blog mostly for fun, without the commercial incentives of many other sites, I was surprised to note that my visitor statistics dropped precipitously this Spring. Cluster maps reset our maps in July, and the drop-off since then was remarkable. Here is last year’s map, which looks pretty busy. You can see this year’s in the left menu bar.

With all the other stuff I have going, I really didn’t pay much attention to it, until Mr. F and Karen pointed out that if you use Google to search for “Laura Freberg,” neither my homepage nor my blog come up. Ever. They disappeared off the face of the planet. My webpage for my Sensation/Perception course at Cal Poly came up, and probably about 10 people look at that in any given year. This is so weird.

Not being a true “techie,” I decided to read up on the blacklisting thing and engage in some simple experimentation. First of all, I found a very helpful article on eZine that redirects you to a site where you can see if your DNS number is blacklisted. I know my DNS number from Powweb, and it came through just fine.

Reading further, I found that Google had been sued in California by a company called KinderStart, which had a huge drop in business after Google blacklisted their page. I was curious to see how the suit turned out, but hey, I was using Google to search, so maybe they blacklisted the results? Another article noted that Google had blacklisted German auto giant BMW. Wow. Maybe I should feel flattered.

The difference between my site and these, however, is that I haven’t engaged in any site-promoting practices. The eZine article and Google’s own guidelines point out some of the “no no’s” that can get you in trouble, like using “Britney Spears” as a keyword for all of your posts.

Feeling a bit more informed, I checked my site on Yahoo. Bingo. My blog and homepage come up right at the top. So it appears to be a Google only issue. I logged on to my Google Webmaster tools, where I had carefully verified our sites, and found that my site had no cache (it returned an error page) and had last been visited in June. When I clicked on the Links tool, I got another error page, and the info:www.laurafreberg.com/blog returned a bunch of gibberish about different mp3s. Checking Mr. F’s and Karen’s sites showed that they had been visited in the last couple of days, and both had fairly current caches.

On the Google webmaster site, you can submit a “request reconsideration” if they’ve blacklisted you, but they say it will take several weeks. I’ll keep you posted. If they can’t fix it, I’m going to switch to Yahoo!