Some time ago, I noticed the traffic on this site dropping off rapidly. Commensurate with it’s global norms, Google was driving the majority of new users here, and one day that traffic stopped without warning.

To see that happen is quite strange, akin to having your water supply cut off when the reservoir up the valley is full to the brim. There’s no easy way to ask why (and if you find your way through the webmaster tools to request reconsideration (in the stairless-basement; locked filing cabinet, “Beware of the leopard” sign etc), the likelihood is they won’t respond in a timely manner, and when they do respond the content will be terse and useless, at least, it was for me).

After much banging of my head on the wall of Google, eventually, an anonymous feedback engineer offered up that this site was “manually blocked” because someone else (let’s call them an operative, because it sounds dystopian) decided this is a “spam blog”. Google provided no more information than that, but eventually, after about 6 months, decided to unblock the pipes and people started to find the site again.

The Moral

The moral? It’s not safe to rely on only Google traffic for a business. If someone at Google makes an honest mistake then your whole livelihood can be removed overnight, with no warning, no explanation and no hope of a quick fix.

Hopefully, Google+ will go some way to alleviating this problem. The massive verified-human-crowd-sourced database of opinion on sites should go some way to removing the mis-flagging of normal small sites as spam blogs.

If you’d be so kind as to +1 this site, it might go some way to avoiding any future unplanned absence from the web (as google describes it).

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