I just changed my WordPress theme after 4 years. If you are a blogger and regularly follows my blog, you may get the urge to change too after seeing mine But you just made your change. Should you follow? Hah! It may not be a good idea.

How frequently should you change your WordPress theme?

A Personal Blog

If you are running a personal blog where most of the visitors that comes to your blog and engaged in the conversation are the people you know, then it should not be a problem to change it frequently.

Frequently here means, maybe once a year. Maybe a change to reflect your new year resolutions or something. Please don’t do it daily or monthly. People may not like it and stop visiting your blog as they will get annoyed.

I know I will.

If you are the person that prefer to change your theme as your mood change, use a WordPress theme that allows you to change the background easily. At least the navigation, functionalities and overall layout of your theme is still the same.

A Business Blog

If you have a business blog or you want to build a brand around your personal blog, do not. Please make the change as seldom as possible!

The design of your blog contributes to the brand you are promoting. If you do it frequently, your readers/customers would not be able to adjust to the design that easily. They may loose focus on your brand and you will loose your marketability. If you still want to change it frequently, then … why build a brand?

If you need to, introduced the change gradually and make the announcement before the change so that your loyal readers are aware and not suprised. They might think there’s a take over at your company if it changes suddenly.

I am not saying that you should stick with one design forever, I didn’t. A new design will add freshness to a website, just don’t do it frequently.

p/s A side effect on changing theme – some post may get involve in the Google dance due to structure change. Mine, related to the Lelaki Kacak got lost in the dance

I have been using WhiteBeans since 2008, but starting 1st April 2012, Blog.Azwan has changed to a new wordpress theme.

There’s nothing wrong with WhiteBeans. It has everything I need – At that time. However, it has not been upgraded in line with WordPress upgrade. Bat InfoMalaya has stop making any changes to it since 2009. I can’t use any new WordPress functionalities unless I make the modification myself or use plugins.

Now that, I have been actively updating this blog, I needed the change.

SimpleReader – My new Wordrpress theme!

Hence, comes in SimpleReader. I decided to use SimpleReader from Colorlabs since I am already very familiar with their framework. I also have other blogs that are using their themes.

SimpleReader meets my requirement for Blog.Azwan. The theme options panel in the WordPress dashboard is easy to use and it’s integrated with a comprehensive SEO management system. Previously I am using the All In One SEO plugin and I don’t see any differences after making the change. Although it comes with a SEO management system, but it will auto disable itself it you want to stick to your current SEO plugin.

SimpleReader is a responsive wordpress theme. It simply means that, it will auto adjust itself regardless whether you are viewing it using your notebook, tablet or smartphone. It will automatically adjust the look and feel without the need for you to use your fingers to enlarge or reduce the view.

Switch on your smartphone browser now and check out azwan.my from your phone.

Plus … with SimpleReader, I managed to remove about 15 plugins. I hope Blog.Azwan will load faster than before.

And I like the abundance of whitespace. I can make my readers focus to the content much better.

So far the themes I am using from Colorlabs are simple the use, and the support is superb. Not as fast as the support from my hosting provider, Serverfreak, but most of my questions are answered within a day or two. If you are interested with the themes from Colorlabs, check them out here (affiliate). There are some themes there that are free.

Or you can get the ones from WordPress. The WordPress Theme Directory is the official site for WordPress Themes. All the themes have been checked and inspected, and best of all … all themes are free for downloading. Get your theme here.

If you are interested in wordpress theme development and want a base to start with, you can also get all the codes for whitebeans at http://code.google.com/p/whitebeans/

So, what do you think of my new wordress theme?

If you don’t know, blog networks are usually private network of blogs that are formed for the purpose of building links to one another or to those who pays them. Webmasters would pay these private networks to get as much links as money can buy, back to their blogs. It try to tricked Google into thinking that their blogs are popular and in return Google with list their pages in the first page of Google. This is call keyword spamming.

If you are making money online, the difference between the first and any other position can be a few thousand dollars (depending on how you monetize your blogs).

What I am about to discuss is, if you have always been a good boy (or girl) and have been following Google’s Webmaster Guidelines to the dot, but one day did something stupid that got Google to think that you are spamming their indexing process and got your blog de-indexed, what should you do?

How Can I know That My Blog Got De-Index?

1. The first  indication that can tell you that your blog got de-index is to look at your traffic pattern. From the picture below, it is obvious that something is wrong. If you are getting 1000 visits per day and suddenly your are getting only 20-30 visitors or lesser, you should investigate.

2. Secondly, check your statistics. If the bulk of your traffic is organic traffic and mostly are from Google, but suddenly you are only getting traffic from Bing or Yahoo, then most probably your blog has been de-index by Google.

How Can I Be Sure That My Blog Is De-Index?

Simple, get your site registered with Google webmaster central. For those that already registered, login and check your submitted sitemap. The example below is from Blog.Azwan. As at 2 April 2012, Google has indexed 185 of my posts and pages, out of 185 that I submitted using my sitemap.xml.

If your site is being de-index, the one in red will be equals to 0.

By registering with Google webmaster tools you will get the following info of your blog:

• Access to top search queries on Google that people used to get to your blog.
• Crawl errors. Which page that the Google bots can’t access.
• Keywords that are relevant to you site.
• Sitelinks management.
• Links to your site.
• and more …

What Happens After Google De-Indexed Your Blog?

If you are de-indexed by Google, you are doom. Your blog will never be found in Google for whatever search term you use, not even your blog’s address. Even if you type your exact domain at Google search engine, the ones that are being listed at the SERPs, will not be yours. Although you go up to the last page of the results, none of your pages or posts would be found.

The only traffic that would be coming to your blog are through Bing, Yahoo or the sites that are linking to you. The only way to be listed back by Google write to Google and get your blog reconsidered.

How I Got My Blog De-Index and How I Got It Index Back By Google Again?

When I managed to get a page from one of my blog to the first page of Google SERPs for a certain keyword, my sales commission from Clickbank increases. My backlink strategy worked. Instead doing it slow and steady, I decided to get a SEO company to optimized a few more pages to get them on first page of Google. The problem is, I did not check in detail how they work or even ask for example of the things they did. They were cheap. The links are coming in too many and too fast.

As a result, Google detected the keyword spamming process and in the end de-index my blog.

Traffic came down and no more commission from Clickbank.

I waited for 2 months and nothing change. No traffic coming from Google. There’s nothing else that I can do, in the end I decided to write to Google for my blog reconsideration.  I admitted to my mistake of keyword spamming. Remove all the links that was created and also the pages that got the links.

Google does has a heart!

After 2 weeks, I got a reply from them:

Dear site owner or webmaster of http://oneofazwan’sblog.com/,

We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://oneofazwan’sblog.com/ for compliance with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Previously the webspam team had taken manual action on your site because we believed it violated our quality guidelines. After reviewing your reconsideration request, we have revoked this manual action. It may take some time before our indexing and ranking systems are updated to reflect the new status of your site.

Of course, there may be other issues with your site that could affect its ranking without a manual action by the webspam team. Google’s computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users. If your site continues to have trouble in our search results, please see this article for help with diagnosing the issue.

Thank you for helping us to maintain the quality of our search results.

Sincerely,

Google Search Quality Team

If your have been following the guidelines all the while, but got careless, don’t worry. It’s not the end of the world. Write to Google for a reconsideration, but make sure you fix your mistake before writing to them. You must make a substantial amount of effort on your side before asking for a reconsideration request.

That’s why I told you in this post that although I am taking part in the SEO contest, I will do the optimizing of Lelaki Kacak ethically.

Perkara yang menakutkan bagi seorang blogger yang bergantung kepada trafik untuk menjana pendapatan ialah apabila Google meng-de-indexkan blog-blog blogger tersebut. Perkara ini berlaku kepada aku beberapa bulan lepas menyebabkan pendapatan menurun sehingga 90%. Kalau RM100 sebulan, tinggal RM10 ajelah. Cuma cukup untuk tol sehari, sepinggan nasi lemak dan teh tarik. Kalau lepas tu sakit perut, nak beli tisu nak masuk tandas yang 30 sen tu pun tak cukup.

Bukan Blog.Azwan, tapi blog-blog aku yang lain. Lihat gambar di atas, walaupun sekarang, tapi sudah tentu ia akan mengambil masa yang agak lama untuk kembali seperti sebelumnya.

Oleh itu aku terpaksa berhati-hati dalam proses mengSEOkan Lelaki Kacak.

Apa yang sebenarnya berlaku?
Apa yang berlaku apabila blog anda dide-indexkan oleh Google?
Apa yang patut anda lakukan untuk memujuk Google supaya mengiindex kembali blog anda?

Kita tunggu esok (atau lusa) ye. Malam ni dah ngantuk dah.