It seems these days that nobody in the US can build a decent search engine.
Just recently, I discovered that this site was no longer receiving traffic, so I looked and found something interesting.
Google has almost completely removed this site from their search results.
Search Google for “Jonathan Mumm” – this page used to be #3, now it’s not even in the top 10 pages!
The same search for Bing shows me at #1.
- I didn’t change anything on my site in that time. (Unless Google hates my last post about how the Windows 7 Phone sucks?)
- I used the same exact White-hat SEO techniques/plugins on other sites I have built that Google loves.
- No malware is installed on my site.
- (Did Google see my Reddit submission for an article I link below?) Highly doubtful, but this is the same time as my problems started.
Why did that happen? Great question and I haven’t been able to point to anything other than Google’s recent “Farmer Update.”
Google’s latest update has affected many sites on the internet for the worse. It’s not just mine.
I have requested reconsideration of my site several times to Google already, and they have said they are working on a way to fix innocent sites affected by the farmer update, but I think that’s a crappy promise.
How is Google cheating here?
- They haven’t been able to filter out blog-spam for a LONG time. The past year of search results have gotten very bad.
- Google was recently called out for not catching a major SEO offender: JCPenneys and then the company tried to save face by quickly enforcing action on another outstanding offender: Overstock.
- Google manually made changes to their search rankings to punish the two above. IN OTHER WORDS: They didn’t fix their algorithm, they only put a bandage on their results.
- Google Pushes the “Farmer Update” and a large amount of small and legit sites get punished in the process.
Google is not fixing their problems in a way that benefits the web!
So does this mean we should all go to Bing?
Maybe, although Bing was recently caught copying Google’s results! So I don’t see that turning out too well. Plus Bing is notorious for only indexing a few pages of your site unless you’re getting a ton of traffic (personal experience on every site I’ve worked on).