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Return to Google search says ‘I’m somebody!’ again

A delisting from Google equals death, or at least the loss of a limb or two for major sites that depend on search-driven Web traffic. For NickGehring.com, it meant an inconvenience and a bit of embarrassment. It was like the 1970s version of me disappeared from the phone book.

I can’t say what I did or didn’t do that caused my site to disappear from Google search, but it has been fixed.

Most other sites I’ve created hit Google’s search within days. Me.com, however, took eight months. I finally remedied this oversight when I took it off my project backburner late last month. Before finding the solution, I made a few half-hearted attempts to find out why I wasn’t being listed.

I first tried adding my site to Google’s Webmaster Tools. Webmaster Tools show users what Googlebot is encountering as it scans their Web sites and provides other useful information. I figured giving Google permission to collect all it wanted about my online affairs would help. It did not. However, after performing a keyword scan on my site, Google spit out a strange list of keywords that were definitely not mine.

I then skimmed my site for hidden bits of code or those weird words from the list, perhaps from an sql injection attack. WordPress blogs are particularly susceptible to these and other security problems. Because of this, I did a few things to harden my install but found nothing wrong.

Back to Google. Sitemaps Generator, a WordPress plugin, is an easy way to submit your sitemap to the three major search engines. After you create a new post, the plugin generates a new sitemap and notifies Google, Live and Yahoo about the changes via ping. Does it help your site achieve a higher ranking? The plugin’s maker says it doesn’t know but “it can help Google to index and crawl your page better which may result in a more complete index of your page.” Even with the extra effort, no luck.

Meanwhile, Yahoo and Live both indexed my site, but no Google. Searches for help, including a couple of SEO companies’ forums, didn’t help either.

Finally, a random search yielded a great suggestion: Submit my site to Google for reconsideration. The Official Google Webmaster blog outlines how to do it. A couple weeks after submitting my site, it appeared.

You can only imagine my excitement. Much like Navin Johnson (aka Steve Martin in “The Jerk”), I knew I was “somebody” again. I am somebody!

Navin R. Johnson: The new phone book’s here! The new phone book’s here!
Harry Hartounian: Boy, I wish I could get that excited about nothing.
Navin R. Johnson: Nothing? Are you kidding? Page 73 – Johnson, Navin R.! I’m somebody now! Millions of people look at this book everyday! This is the kind of spontaneous publicity – your name in print – that makes people. I’m in print! Things are going to start happening to me now.

Nofollow? Yes, fix! Bring some link love to your commenters

WordPress may be blocking your thoughts from the world.

The blogging software automatically inserts a rel=”nofollow” after hyperlinks in the comment section of its blogs. Google, Yahoo and other search engines do not follow links tagged this way. But what if you are legitimately including URLs in comments on WP blogs? Don’t your brilliant comments/links that contribute to the value of the Web deserve a little link love from search engines?

You can’t do much for the comments you submit on other sites, but you can help out your fellow bloggers by:

1. Manually editing the “nofollow” out of your blog’s WordPress source code, or
2. Using a plugin.

Which option should you use?

Manual edit

You are a control freak, aren’t you? Hacking your WP source code isn’t hard, but it can be tedious, especially as updates become available. This means keeping track of your changes and making sure they aren’t erased when you copy over the upgrade files.

I don’t do this to the WordPress sites I manage because it’s too much of a bother to keep track of the edits. Laziness certainly plays a role, too.

Online marketing guru Douglass Karr said he had troubles with the Do Follow plugin and developed his own hands-on solution. In his blog, he gives some tips on how to manually pluck the nofollows out of your comment section.

Plugins

Perishable Press provides a comprehensive list of dofollow plugins. I picked the DoFollow plugin due to its very simple options. Others allow you to specify how many comments a commenter must make, or what length of time must pass, before his or her nofollow is removed.

No spam

I already use WP-reCAPTCHA to prevent comment spam and have Akismet, which comes with WordPress, turned on. Between the two, and moderating my own comments, spam *knock on my wood desk* isn’t much of a problem. Because I “trust” the comments I approve on my own blog, I’m not worried about blog spam, either.

Why nofollow?

Philosophically, the automatic inclusion of nofollow in WP comments makes some sense, especially for bloggers who lack tech savvy or install a blog and forget about it. But moderating your comments and installing basic anti-spam plugins is all a blogger really needs to fight evil spam. Having nofollows around blog comments hurts legitimate efforts to illuminate discourse and drive link love to useful sites.

Discussions about nofollow continue. Here SEOmoz talks with Google’s Matt Cutts, who helped develop the tag in 2005.