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.

Buzz is like something that is better than Twitter, but not as heavy as Facebook. Some people like it, some no and there are some that even say that buzz is bugging them. So … if you feel the same, then just turn it off.

How To Turn Goolge Buzz Off
Simple. Just 3 steps.

1. Log in to GMail
2. Scroll to the bottom
3. Click ‘turn off buzz’

But, if you are like me, that likes Buzz a little and hates it a little, you could also be selective with the Buzz. Don’t like to see the update of a certain post, turn it off.

How To Turn Off A Specific Google Buzz
In 5 steps, a bit longer

1. Log in to GMail
2. Go to Buzz
3. Find the buzz you dont like
4. Click on the arrow next to comment – top right of the buzz
5. Click ‘Mute this post’

There you go, two simple way to turn off your buzz.

Earlier, I also asked whether should we have the meaning for the word Bing in the dictionary, like the one we already have for Google. After going through some statistics from comScore, looks like Bing is not even able to beat Yahoo! in the search engine wars.

Asia Pacific
According to a study by comScore in September 2009, 38.6 billion searches were conducted in the Asia Pacific region. An increase of 33% from the previous year. Google ranked as the top search destination with 44% shares, while Baidu has 21.3% market share, followed by Yahoo! 13.8%. Bing was not mentioned, but Microsoft sites share is less than 10%.

Google’s 44% equals to 17 billion searches and that is a lot of searches in a month. Google captured the majority share of searches in Malaysia with 71.1%. I don’t have the exact search phrases that were used, but the data is enough to show that more people are using search engines to get information. They are using Bing the least.

United States
November 2009′s data on US search engine rankings showed almost the same result.

Google Sites led the U.S. core search market in November with 65.6 percent of the searches conducted, followed by Yahoo! Sites (17.5 percent), and Microsoft Sites (10.3 percent). Ask Network captured 3.8 percent of the search market, followed by AOL LLC with 2.8 percent.

Microsoft sites (Bing included), although at third place, only able to get 10% of the total searches, regardless whether it is in the US or in Asia Pacific.

If you are doing search engine optimization, you can drop Bing from your list of search engines to optimize, but if you are targeting China, you must consider Baidu. Google is still number two in China, and it will be that way for a while. Based on the experience working in a Chinese company, Chinese will always prefer Chinese products to others, unless Google could come out with something to temp them to change. Maybe with Android?

Concentrate your SEO to suits Google. Ignore the rest

Verb:
He googled the woman he had met at the party.
My children are googling all day.

Noun:
A widely used search engine that uses text-matching techniques to find web pages that are important and relevant to a user’s search.

Now …. it seems like a lot of traffic has started to come from BING. This is what I noticed from my traffic statistics and I am sure that in the future, the percentage will be bigger.

So, should we have a new meaning of BING in the dictionary