Beat Down by Google

I think I was slapped by Google. I have read about it, I have been warned and I have seen it happen to others. I figured I'm not out there creating any waves so they will be nice to me unless I had a big traffic site. Well it turns out I did. I was getting a ton of traffic on a little site that I threw together some time ago and I didn't even know it.

You see, I have a simple fan site for an under-publicized, under-rated and under-appreciated ESPN sport reporter named Colleen Dominguez. As it turned out, when I set up the site, there wasn't anything about her on the internet. I didn't put a whole lot of time into it and frankly I forgot about it. Several months later I was getting some serious traffic and even Colleen popped in to check it out. A few people have even sent pictures that can only be found on my site like the one below. I even had a discussion board that was getting a ton of traffic until the spammers killed it. Well, I killed it... but they started it. Stupid spammers.



Anyway, I used to rank #1 in Google for the search terms "Colleen Dominguez" and "Colleen Dominguez Pictures." I still am #1 in Yahoo and MSN and rank respectably with Ask. Not the case with the big G. The images are still showing up in Google image search the normal search listings waved bye bye.

I realized that I had NOT put "no follow" attribute on the links. In my haste of quickly slapping together a links page with links going to sports related websites, I neglected to specify the "no follow." That is the only thing that I can think of that caused me to fall off the charts. I think I went about 20 pages deep and didn't see the site.

The moral of the story boys and girls is: Play nice with Google and follow their rules or get kicked out of their club.

For you experts out there, what is a guy to do now? I can go in and fix the links but is there a way that I can get reinstated into the G club? This could be a fun experiment. Let me know.