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When Your Site Ceases To Exist

Posted by kdawson on from the without-a-trace dept.

El Lobo writes with a sobering account of how Javalobby dropped off the face of Google last month. The site had been attacked by forum spammers and Google indexed some of their spew before the Javalobby guys could remove it. According to a post in Rich Skrenta's blog, Google is now the de-facto front page for the Internet, accounting for anywhere from 70% to 78% of the search market. The power this conveys is hard to overstate. From the Javalobby saga: "We had completely disappeared from Google's main index! If you run a website, then you know how serious a problem this is. On any given day over 10,000 visitors arrive at Javalobby as a result of Google searches, and suddenly they stopped coming! ... Suddenly we no longer existed in the eyes of Google."

3 of 191 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Never heard of them before, so nothings' change by Utopia · · Score: 4, Interesting

    OP might have a point that this is slashvertisement. javalobby is on the top for the 4 primary search engines.

    http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=javalobby&sr c=IE-SearchBox
    http://www.ask.com/web?q=javalobby&qsrc=0&o=333&l= dir
    http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=javalobby&ei=utf- 8&fr=b2ie7
    http://www.google.com/search?q=javalobby&rls=com.m icrosoft:en-us&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&startIndex=&start Page=1

  2. Ceases to Exist, but... site is now on Slashdot? by popo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    See the irony?

    I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that your lame site is getting more traffic than its ever received in a single day.

    Which means that you've just been depending on Google too heavily for too little in return.

    Digg it. Sig it. Promote the hell out of it.

    I'd say this is a non-story, but the irony is that it was ultimately a wonderful short term solution to the author's issue.

    Google does *not* own the Internet unless you depend solely on Google.

    --
    ------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
  3. Re:Man, I thought it was bad when I lost 50 places by Skidge · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I had a similar, but opposite experience. I started setting up Yet Another Job Site, but I never got around to making it useful (see Click. Hired!). Google decided that it sort of liked it for a while, sending some traffic my way. I went from making nothing on my google ads to a few bucks a day. It wasn't much money, but it was fun seeing the traffic come in. Then google decided it was the crappy site that it was and my traffic went back to its deserved trickle. I wrote an article about it with pretty graphs:

    What Google Giveth, Google Can Taketh Away

    I should have submitted it for a slashvertisement. :)