I remember reading this somewhere once upon a time – and now I feel the truth of this on a very personal level:
If your website doesn’t show up in a Google search, it might as well not exist.
About a year ago I was thrilled to see my blog had climbed to the top result in Google when searching for Mark Wagner (with no quotes or other terms necessary)… this is particularly cool for two reasons: I work in educational technology so I want to be easily Google-able, and there are just a truck load of Mark Wagner’s out there!
This made it very easy to locate my own blog posts – and for folks who were in my workshops to reconnect with me. Now, though, that seems to have all changed… this blog is entirely gone from Google results!
You can still find some mentions of me (and this blog) on other sites… but the blog itself is gone. If I search for the title of the blog or the URL, the top hit is my old blogger blog, which points here in its final post. If I do a site specific search on Google using the site: operator (by typing “site:edtechlife.com” or any variation on this), I get… absolutely nothing! I tried a few specific searches like “site:edtechlife MMORPG” that were sure to turn up some of my posts – and nothing!
What happened?
What did I do?
And how can I fix it?
Did I link back to myself too many times from my workshop wikis? Did I in someway displease the Google Gods with my content? (This seems doubly ironic given my relatively new role coordinating the Google Teacher Academy.) I’ve put some effort into finding a course of action for fixing this, but haven’t been very successful. Simply put… I need the help of my network.
Can anyone help or point me in the right direction?
UPDATE: It took until today (Tuesday 07/08/08) for this to be rectified, but this blog exists again. It seems I’ve lost the top spot to the baseball player, who’s made it to a starting position in the big leagues. I’ll have to work on that. ;)
Meanwhile, thank you to everyone who helped out in the comments below.