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Google hates me → log → station11

  1. 23 December 2005

    Google hates me

    I used to be ranked pretty well in google. I remember once my site had a page rank 6, I came up as the first result for kjell olsen and consistently second or third for just kjell.

    But the other day a friend said he looked up my name on google, and it was nowhere to be found. I looked into it, and whoa! I’m eleventh for kjell olsen and I’ve dropped out of the top 100 for kjell. My name!

    Now being ranked high in google made me a little nervous, that someone will google my name and find my site and laugh all night about it. But I really could care less.

    But it’s still a bit of a kick in the balls to get thrown out of google. This site in fact come up first for kjell on both yahoo and msn, but who really even cares?

    My pagerank (according to the firefox google toolbar) is even a tick above that of kjell.com, the site that’s been in the first result for kjell as long as I can remember.

    So I have a few ideas as to why:

    • Awhile back I decided to put about three times as much stuff onto the front page. Maybe google wants the homepage to be more concise, and I threw off the ratio between the amount of times kjell appeared on the page and everything else.
    • For awhile I’d ignored <meta name="author"/>, <meta name="description"/>, and <meta name="keywords"/>. But I don’t think I’d ever bothered to put these in, I don’t know why all the sudden google would drop me because they weren’t there.
    • I’d signed up for google analytics when it came out, maybe google saw how little traffic I really get and decided that nobody would want to find the site.
    • All I ever do these days is repost quotes from what I read off the web, the ratio of those to original content isn’t as high as it should be. I really hate it when I google something and get a link to someone who linked to the primary source, I bet google does too.
    • I don’t comment on other peoples blogs much, but a have a few times. It might have been the whole rel="nofollow" got me, there aren’t too many sites linking to mine.

    I put the meta tags in my <head>, but doubt that will do much. My markup is fairly clean, although I went a bit far structuring everything with lists. I don’t know how hard I’ll care to work to get myself back into google, but it would be nice. And I’m insidiously hoping that I mentioned my name (kjell) enough in this one article to make google notice me again.

    tags:

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