In spite of my love of technology, and the fact that in my next life I’d love to be a videogame programmer, I have to remind myself that I’m supposed to be a psychologist, and that I don’t have to be expert in everything that I do.
Still, I find that the culture of research methodology and systematic thinking that we have in psychology definitely is useful when faced with problem solving in general. Yesterday, I took some time off from my testbank writing–a good thing, because when I write questions non-stop, I tend to get mean! I did some more research on my Google blacklist status, and came across a very helpful tool. At Bad Neighborhood, Michael Van DeMar provides a number of really helpful links, including a tool that highlights “questionable links” on your site that may trigger a blacklist. It also tells you which sites linked to yours that have questionable links, which may cause you some indirect problems.
All you do is type in your URL, and bingo–a list of problems shows up. What is especially funny about psychology sites is our use of some of the “red flag” words, like sex, adult, drugs, and so on….oh no, now I’ve maybe set my site back to blacklist mode again! But I also found some serious stuff. My WordPress footer had been hacked, and there was a huge list of hidden links to all kinds of disreputable stuff. Mystery solved. I removed the links, so hopefully, I’ll be back in Google’s good graces soon. You have to look at the source code, not just the page.
This morning, I received a very helpful comment from John Mueller of Google, in response to my first blacklist post below. It looks like in addition to the footer, I still have some cleanup work to do. John points out that I am using an older version of WordPress. I know that’s a problem, and this mess has shown me that upgrading is just something I have to set the time aside to do.
As John suggested, if you search my blog along with the name of the medication listed in the image above (now I’m getting paranoid about using words), look what comes up!
It was nice to get a response from Google on this. I’m sure they have a few other issues on their desktops much larger than my little blog, and I appreciate the attention. It would be nice if they could cut a deal with Bad Neighborhood and offer some of those tools on their Webmaster site. I went through all the diagnostics they offered, and to my untrained eye, no problems emerged. Yes, a lot of blogs and websites are run professionally by people who know all the ins and outs, but I don’t think I’m alone as an amateur either. I hope we don’t reach the point where you have to pay experts to manage your website, because a lot of the fun is in learning this stuff as you go.
