The New Google Way? Customer Service is what the Little People Do
Update: I finally figured out what is most likely the reason for our partial blanking in Google: programmer error. The site was aborting whenever it detected a bot and Googlebot only saw a blank page anytime it tried to crawl. While I have to admit it's pretty embarassing to trace the problem back to myself, my grumblings about Google customer service still stands. They really need to do something about that.
I'm posting this while extremely frustrated. Maybe I'll regret this later, but for now, I feel my ire is entirely justified.
Google may proudly declare that they're not evil, but I'm beginning to feel that they're also not "good" either.
About a month ago, the socialwave.net site started vanishing from the Google index and at the time of this writing, about the only thing you can find from Social Wave in Google is this blog. My site appears to be at least partially banned from Google.
Social Wave's site traffic has cratered to about 25% to 50% of its normal traffic on any given day. That's probably not as drastic as a drop that many other sites would have experienced because Social Wave is a regional site and we usually don't get massive numbers of non-local visitors, but the drop has hurt very significantly and it really hurts the small businesses and organizations who use the free services I provide to them through Social Wave to grab a tiny piece of online mindshare from their huge corporate mega-tailer competition. For some of these businesses, they have little online presence that they own outside of Social Wave.
I won't deny that I probably did something that is frowned upon by Google to draw a penalty like this. The problem is that, I have no idea what it is and their webmaster's quality guidelines are hardly helpful. The best advice they have in there is to "not do anything that you would find unfair if your competitor was doing it." Roughly translated, I guess it means "do unto other as you would want others to do unto you" and we won't punish you.
Upon thoroughly reviewing the entire socialwave.net site and the two affiliated Downtown portal sites (downtowncampbell.com and downtownwillowglen.org), I've found a few things that could have been identified as offenses, but none of them were done for the purposes of manipulating Page Rank or for keyword stuffing purposes. And speaking personally, I do not feel that I've been guilty of doing unto others as I would not want them to do unto me.
As far as I can tell, here are the offenses that I've been guilty of. If any of these were indeed violations, I hope you can see that they're technical violations rather than gross violations intended to game search engine rankings. Technical violations shouldn't be met with a policy of silence. Anyway, all of these issues have been addressed and I hope to automagically see socialwave.net back in the Google index again within another week..
Here are the possible violations:
- Five Hidden Words in the footer
This isn't as bad as it sounds. Usually people use hidden words to stuff keywords. This was simply a case of stupidity and laziness. A program I was using generated a generic registration stub (that I paid money to omit) that was no longer relevant. It was hard coded so instead of hacking the code, I just put SPAN tags around it and made it the same color as the background - Potentially mistaken hidden links in the sidebar
One page analyzer came back with the surprising result that I had a lot of hidden links embedded on the page. It turns out that the way the CSS was coded caused this elementary evaluation tool to think the links were a similar color to the background (not even close). Hopefully, the evaluator that Google uses is smarter than the one I used. - Mistaken for Link Farming?
The main Social Wave site and the two Downtown sites have close relationships. A significant amount of Social Wave content is actually stuff intended for one of the Downtown sites. Social Wave acts as both a website and a content engine for these affiliate sites. In a few areas Social Wave and the affiliate sites refer links back and forth to each other simply because some of the content is located only on one site. - Link spamming?
Most of the content on Social Wave's affiliate sites are essentially syndicated copies of stuff on Social Wave. I started putting a permalink back to the original source on Social Wave (instead of the affiliate site) because as I understand it, the permalink should go back to the most stable version of the source material. - JavaScript in the HTML Source
Instead of referenced by a link to a static JavaScript file
You're either nodding your head in frustrated agreement right now because you've gone through this too or you're snickering at a total idiot who's grasping at straws. I see myself both ways because I've been making websites since Mosaic 1.0. I do a little bit of everything. I'm no domain expert, but I know enough about everything mainstream that when I do run into a problem, I know how to seek support or resources to get something handled. I usually laugh at the guy running around with his hair of fire screaming out crazy supersitious things, except this time I'm that guy.
I'm not sure how I got to be the crazy guy this time, but I think it had to do with the absolute lack of customer service provided by Google. You don't contact Google, they contact you. Well, that's only figuratively true. You can try to contact them, but don't expect them to so much as provide a confirmation that they received or processed your request.
They suggest that you get help from other webmasters in their Google Groups, but the problem there is that there are tons of well intentioned people there who are giving out advice that cannot be proven as valid. Some of the advice is probably at best a waste of time and possibly even counter productive.
If anyone from Google runs across this, all I have to say is can you please do something to help me out? If you think I'm evil, at least tell me so in uncertain terms so I can quit this pathetic cycle of feeling like I'm praying to a deity who never talks back to me no matter how much I want to please it?
This experience has allowed me to understand why some people see Google as arrogant. I thought it was simply a case of top dog envy. That's definitely part of it, but for me, it's because I feel like Google has declared itself a deity before me. The crops that I've farmed are getting washed away by the rains and when my human efforts fail to stem the waters, I'm reduced to praying to a power that may or may not be sympathetic to my troubles.
It's hard to believe that a company that proudly hires the bestest (sic) and the brighterest (sic) is unable to also find some nicerest (sic) customer service reps to throw in the mix. I've had problems with Yahoo and AOL for various things too, but the difference there was that someone actually got back to me. Sure it was often 95% form letter, but the mere fact of being acknowledged breaks the hallucinatory feeling of form emailing a higher power. Customer service at other Internet companies is frustrating. Customer service at Google sucks and is mostly non-existent.
