Live By The Google, Die By The Google
written by John Chow
The Googlebot came by my blog on Friday to spider it. I’m not sure the exact time it showed up but according to Google Webmaster Tools, 193 URLs didn’t get indexed because of a “Network unreachable” error. That normally means my blog was down when the spider came. Looking at my logs, I concluded that the Googlebot must have came around the time when the crazy Comment Relish plugin did the MySQL DOS attack on me and took the blog down for almost two hours.
The next day, I find my ranking had gone down for many of the keywords I ranked for, including make money online. With 193 unreachable URLs, I’m not surprised that search traffic is down. This should be an easy fix. Now that the site is running at full speed again, all I need to do is invite the Googlebot to come back and try again. That should restore everything.
I want to thank everyone for sending me an “OMG! You’re not #1 anymore!” email. This kind of situation always highlight the saying, “Live by the Google, die by the Google.” For many websites, their only source of Internet traffic is Google. Without it, their traffic is nothing. That is a very scary situation to be in because if Google wants to, they can remove you from their index at the snap of a finger and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Yes, you should work on getting Google traffic, but you shouldn’t do it the exclusion of everything else. If the bulk of your traffic comes from Google, then you need to work on getting other traffic sources. Just as I advise that Google AdSense shouldn’t be your sole online income source, Google search shouldn’t be your sole traffic source.
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Darn, I am sorry to hear about your loss in rank. Good post reminding people to not just concentrate on Google traffic. I want to be John Chow when I grow up :D.
Oh yeah, and I forgot to say…
Omg! You’re not #1!
Hi John - it happened to me as well. I have 21,000 pages in my sitemap and Google at one point showed me that I had over 800 pages with errors. I fixed a few pages and asked Google to came back and it’s now down to under 90. It’s had a great impact on rankings since it’s gone back up.
That darn plugin.. and I was about to implement it on my site.
To invite Googlebot you can use QUIT:
http://www.bluehatseo.com/quit-quick-indexing-tool/
This tool is amazing when it comes to making Googlebot come to you ASAP, and it does nothing illegal.
How does it work Mike?
Very true. Is there a schedule googlebot has or is it random for you?
I BELIEVE I WAS ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE THAT TOLD YOU
I sent an email
Hey you guys!
how could you post your comment that quick? i thought i was the first to read this post. since i always let my rss reader active.
I know! I thought I had the first comment too…
Are they manually approved or something? This is my third comment for this post and none of them have been published!
You gotta be quicker than quick on this site!
That’s true. I spend my whole day staring at John Chow’s site doing noting but refreshing my browser. Even still I don’t get first comment that often
RSS isn’t real time. The post you see in the reader may not be the latest post.
Ive noticed this quite a few times.
I agree with you John, When google bans you from adsense or their search engine, and you have enought back ups, it won’t hurt you that bad. But when you only have google as your main income and main traffic source, your screwed.
Google-dependence is a hard habit to break, but I agree with you and John — you gotta spread those wings and utilize other means of traffic and income.
It’s hard to really have backups when Google is such a dominant player. If you are working AdSense you don’t get nearly as much from other countries as you do from the US because of Geotargeting and Google is #1 in the US.
It cant bother you much john, With a blog having a dedicated (and addicted
) reader base like yours, screw google!
Yeah Google has most webmasters by the you know what. The percentage of traffic I get from Yahoo, MSN and others combined is less than 5% of total traffic.
This whole Google thing is a large part of Terry Semel stepping down at Yahoo. He just couldn’t make Yahoo competitive enough to keep up with Google’s blistering pace of rising profits and acquisitions.
I’ve got similar numbers as you Shaun. The thing is that every time I make positive changes to my website, I rank better in Google with no change to the others… They really are trying to match their algo to what’s best for users. They don’t always do that, but they’re much closer than the other two horses, far off in the distance.
I have over 130,000 visitors in the past month to my site. 87% of them came from search engines and 94% of those came from Google. I rank in the other search engines - I just don’t think people use them as much as the almighty Google.
You don’t have to worry about Google at all with your RSS feed. No, but hopefully you take back that number 1 spot next update :).
It shouldn’t even take that long. I’d expect the rankings to be back within a few days. If they aren’t then John might have some deeper issues but as I explain below, I’m pretty sure John’s right on the cause of this one.
yeah i noticed you were on the sixth page….
Let’s see how fast you can get your traffic back.
Google has me on the first page for “‘personal finance’ blog”
Woohoo.
I’m first for brilliances but I’ve not seen anyone search for that yet
I also emailed you, i’m glad I wasn’t alone
John - I’d love to see what your top 5 traffic sources were when Google went away. Any chance of a couple of referrer stats shots?
I want to see where his biggest dot is on the analytics maps.
How I wish I can be just half of your traffic, john. (^_^)
I’m sure with those 5000+ RSS subscribers you’d still do alright but I think you’ll make it back to top position anyway!
it is true,
we can not live without Google now,
just like you will die without water.
you can see Google will lead the internet in the next 5-10 years.
That’s not what John was saying at all! He’s saying you can and should be able to live without Google. Google is fickle and if you’re dependent upon them, the foundation of your site and your traffic is built on sand. Read up on “defensible traffic”. It will open your eyes.
Thank you, I sent this article translated into Chinese
Yes John, This kind of thing happens to me a lot of times when my site gets down and Googlebot tries to crawl it,nevertheless you should always look for other traffic sources and I believe the best one is the word of mouth and popularity which comes by your content quality
Set backs like these are temporary — if you decide to seek other opportunities as well.
My Wordpress server was downn thanks to an attack as well. My webhost provider told me to upgrade my Wordpress, so I did that.
Didn’t know plugins could harm me as well, so thanks for that tip John.
What plugin allowed your site to be attacked?
The latest plugin I installed was:
Aizatto’s Related Posts, but it would be wrong to say that this is the cause.
I cannot access my error log to find out what really happened.
Am gonna ask my webhostprovider to explain in detail.
LOL, sure John like u really need Google to make your day
folks like me are just happy to even show up on google period!!
Pitty most search bots copy from each other aswell…
with your loyal base of thousand of daily recurring visitors, a hit by google is to be seen as an opportunity to analyze the traffic and click patterns of those that come to you anyway.
now, i know why your website drop down in ranking.
Dang… A Google Ad just told me “John Chow is Old News”.
You are now 58th result on Google.
Very bad.
omg. you’re not even first for ‘johnchow’ or ‘john chow’
hope getting back to the top is as easy as you say it is…
That’s actually a good sign for John. Dropping your rankings for just a term or two suggests there’s an issue with your site for that term or maybe you’re being penalized for something. Dropping all your ranks for even your site name suggest you’ve got a technical issue, such as a bad .htaccess or robots.txt or in this case, site down time. I’d expect to see John back at the top within the week.
I should clarify, if your site ends up getting penalized you can often drop rankings across the board as well. I was talking about some sort of “over optimization” penalty which is usually term specific rather than site wide.
Congrat! I’ve just check,you are on the top again on google search John.
Or…maybe Google just finally got word of the true depths of depravity which inhabit the heart of “The Royally Evil One”.
Hopefully you can get back that would be a disaster.
“Live by the Google, Die by the Google”
Let’s not beat around the bush: Google dominates the search market. Naturally, you want to rank well in Google for targeted keywords. But if that’s the entirety of your search marketing strategy, you need some major rethinking.
“Wha…
I guess maybe your blog is one of the favourites among the google staffs. once they realize you are not number 1, they quickly restore your blog back to number 1. hehehe.
How annoying must that be for that to happen.