Boy is Google upset with me

August 11, 2007 at 11:42 pm · Filed under Content, Online Marketing

It’s my site, not so much me. Maybe it was never happy with it.

What would make me concerned? Well, first, I do have a reasonable level of SEO knowledge. It’s not my role directly, but it is a service that is highly relative to what I do. So, admittedly, I’m not a practitioner guru by any stretch of the imagination, but I certainly don’t think I’ve done anything remotely harmful. So, back to the question—what would make me concerned?

1. The Google PageRank for my blog’s homepage is 2
   Google PageRank is on a scale of 0 to 10 (there is also a “not yet indexed”). If Google knows you exist, and you aren’t being penalized for any reason, you should have a PageRank of 3.
2. None of my pages beyond my homepage have any PageRank assigned to them whatsoever
3. Google’s Advanced Search indicates I have one inbound link
   The importance of relevant inbound links to Google is undeniable. Luckily, several web sites and blogs have picked up on posts and linked to them. However, Google is only crediting me with one when I use their advanced search and check (when I just search for smcandrew.com I come up with more than 200 in-bound links).

A little more backstory on my blog

I initially hosted a blog, on this domain, using Blogger’s hosted blog solution. My Blogger site did have more pages with PageRank, across the blog I had PageRanks of 4 or 3. I was looking for something that provided more flexibility and switched to a WordPress solution. When moving to WordPress, I did my best to make the transition smooth, and, if anything, improve my search affinity:

• I did 301 redirects for the new locations of all moved content since Blogger and WordPress’ directory and page naming schema are different
• I utilized WordPress plug-ins to populate my Meta tags (I honestly do not know how Blogger was populating them)
• I modified my page titles to focus on content (as opposed to the name of my blog)
• I incorporated a Google Sitemap, and a WordPress plug-in which updates and resubmits it automatically

I want to be in Google’s good graces. My site isn’t heavily trafficked, but of the traffic I do get, more than half is from Google.

So what did happen? Maybe it was the move from Blogger and the slight modifications I made in tags and page titling (though I’d hoped that since everything was 301′d Google would look at the ‘updated’ site and content as a good thing). Maybe it is something about how the HTML is outputted between Blogger and WordPress. I’m not exactly sure. I get SEO feedback and gain knowledge on what has upset the Google Gods, I’ll post it here on this blog.

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