You're talking out of your ass and it's really infuriating to hear people disregard real, tangible problems you are facing.

Google makes software, and no software is perfect. I've been bitten by shitty google services before. My most recent sting was Google Webmaster Tools not showing any Googlebot crawls to me website. My website is very niche and literally 1 of 4 competitors in the same arena.

5 month. 5 MONTHS. and google has yet to crawl my website, even though google analytics shows me stats day in day out.

Why? Google breaks sometimes, and it's incredibly crappy that you can't even reach out to someone to ask what's up.

Hello friend. You seem angry so I'm going to attempt to tread lightly as I throw some friendly suggestions out.

1. Do you have a verified valid robots.txt that Google can read?

2. Does your verified valid robots.txt point to a verified valid sitemap or sitemap index?

3. Did your submit your verified valid sitemap or sitemap index to Google Webmaster Tools?

Based on the responses to this, I or someone else might be able to help you further. Good luck to you.

I'm not angry, just trying to drive a point home using colorful language.

1. Yes, I have that. 2. Yes, I also have that.

3. Here's an actual screenshot of my google webmaster tools for my website:

http://i.imgur.com/9Nwgts1.png

Remember: We're now closing in on 6 months with Google just not crawling my site whereas other search engines crawl near daily.

Two other pieces of information would be great here.

1) What is the URL in question.

2) When you click the 'why not' link what does it say?

The other (possibly not relevant) question is whether or not you have any Google advertising or not on your site. I'm not suggesting that there is a 'pay for play' here, what I'm looking at is that when you use 'AdsenseForContent' or (AfC) the only way Google can know what sort of ads would make sense on your page is to crawl them first. If you had AfC ads on your page and Google wasn't crawling them, then that would suggest that your URLs are black listed for some reason. At Blekko our crawler tries to avoid sites that are either patently malicious (they've got known exploits in their pages) or on a list of malware/childporn sites, or have complex page structures that don't involve recursive crawling loops.

What is the URL of your site?

My url is: http://www.smitecamp.com

Your robots.txt is nothing but comments. It doesn't specify the URL of your sitemap. It does have a blanket disallow for all user agents for the root of your site. It is commented out (like everything else) but if that was ever uncommented that could be your problem.

I guessed your sitemap URL since it isn't in your robots.txt. You have every single page listed as being updated hourly. Even if that is true I wouldn't put that in there.

And what is your relationship to https://www.hirezstudios.com/smitegame/home ? I ask because it seems like you share a lot of material. Game studios get a bit twitchy about that when it isn't part of their PR plan.

Hmm, if that were the case I'd expect it to show up in the Transparency report though.

(I work at Google on webmaster issues) Your site has a manual spam action probably based on something a previous owner had on it ( https://web.archive.org/web/20110202220759/http://smitecamp.... shows scraped Yahoo Answers content). You can see that in Webmaster Tools under Search Traffic / Manual Actions. Submitting a reconsideration request should do the trick.

Some things that may explain things:

According to ahrefs, the number of referring pages (a big factor search results) dropped from about 22k pages to well under 1k over the course of 2 months starting at the end of march (source: https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/overview/subdomains/www.por...).

Additionally, it seems the site does show up in Google search results on the 10th page (https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=photo%20quilts#h...).

I'll be honest, I don't understand what exactly that means, but it seems to have happened at around the same timeframe that you're referring to (5 or 6 months ago), so I'm going to bet it's a factor.

Hope you figure it out - the whole search engine algorithm thing is really complex.

But, honestly, I don't believe that Google just stopped working for a single domain. The more likely scenario is that something you/your sister is unaware of changed and had a large negative result.

I'd contend you're the one talking out of their ass.

Relying on another company for all your business isn't a sound business strategy. The person in the article put all their eggs in one basket and this is the result.

This is trivializing to the point of absurdity. When it comes to doing business on the Internet in the English-speaking world, Google is the basket. It's the only basket. I wish it weren't, but it is.

And so, yes, pretty much everyone is reliant on them to be good stewards of the power they possess. (Whether they are or not is orthogonal to that the quilter in question has a pretty good reason to feel like they aren't.)

I really can't agree with that. We've built businesses in the pre-Google days when search engines were a hit or miss affair.

Except that now everyone goes to Google. It's not just a search engine, it's literally the starting point for the overwhelming majority of web traffic.

If Google is against you, you're done.

In principle, I'd agree that relying on another company is not a sound business strategy, but Google has a virtual stranglehold on organic traffic to websites, something that is outside the control of most web companies.

How do you suggest a web-based company should counter that and not rely on google for much of their business?

Marketing? You know, advertising, social media, word of mouth, etc.

Many of those channels rely on guiding people to search engines, or at the very least being findable on search engines by name. To take this example, your website is called portrait quilts, the url is http://portraitquilts.com/ - so you do loads of advertising on twitter, print media, word of mouth etc, and people try to find your site. You can try to guide them to a unique url, but often people won't remember urls, but names, and are encouraged to use this method by the blurring of urls and keyword searches in browsers.

So they open up their browser, type portrait quilts in the address bar, which redirects to a search, and your website is on page 8 despite being an exact match on the search. Game Over.

Seems your other channels are not quite as effective as you thought if google decides to penalise or blacklist your site. If you're off page 1 or 2 you may as well not exist. Of course from Google's point of view, you'll just have to advertise with google, so this doesn't penalise them at all, in fact they are rewarded monetarily for arbitrarily shifting rankings periodically (not that I'm suggesting that they go out of their way to do this, just that the perverse incentive is there).

One free thing you can do to optimize marketing is to not name your business a generic term. If your business has a unique name you generally don't have to worry about competitors outranking you for the name. For example, I don't think my brother will ever get outranked for "porcelain rocket"; he currently owns not just the top spot but the entire first page.

Plenty of products/services like Windows, Xerox, tipex start as generic terms or become them during their lifetime. I'm not saying that they should therefore always come first, but it's instructive if you compare xerox to this website - they dominate the entire first page of google results. What should come first is what would be useful for end users, and I think it's fair to expect a company named after and with an url of a phrase to come at least once on that first page, if lots of people link to them (as from other search engine results they appear to). If that's not the case, Google should be transparent about why these penalties are applied. I understand why they don't want to be transparent for commercial reasons and to stop people gaming the system, but think given their monopoly position it behoves them to be so. Otherwise they can destroy businesses maliciously or, even worse, with complete indifference.

Personally I find Google is providing results which are less and less useful, with their recent emphasis on monetising search, indifference to fairness, and lack of transparency as to their ranking methods - it certainly seems as if in this case a draconian penalty has been applied, and there is no effective way to appeal or even find out what the judgement against them was (webmasters very often is not helpful). A penalty of a few places would be completely understandable if they don't like this site for whatever reason, a penalty of 8 pages while other spammy results dominate search terms is not.

I've switched to DuckDuckGo for now and it's pretty good. Compare the results for Tipex (a popular brand of correction fluid in Europe) for example:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tipex https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=tipex

The brand is "Tipp-Ex".

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tipp-ex

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=tipp-ex&oq=tipp-ex&gs_l=se...

http://www.bing.com/search?q=tipp-ex&go=&qs=n&form=QBLH&filt...

http://www.yandex.com/yandsearch?text=tipp-ex&lr=87

http://www.dogpile.com/search/web?fcoid=417&fcop=topnav&fpid...

http://uk.search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=An3Le.5YQeHZ499qBVnAQ...

Thanks.

But that costs money!

;)

Try posting it to Google Plus, you should get crawled instantly (not necessarily indexed though).

A quick 2-minute check shows that yes, indeed the site violates Google guidelines. If you check the backlinks using any number of checkers (Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs, Majestic SEO) you can find a number of over-optimized 'unnatural' backlinks residing on spammy link-exchange pages in clear violation of Google's guidelines. The only reason to place links on these pages would be to try to rise higher in Google's search results.

Yes, it feels unfair when Google drops you in search results, and Google has changed the rules over the years and it's hard to keep up with shifting guidelines.

In truth, the website can recover from this. The same people who placed spammy links on 3rd party sites in order to manipulate rankings are probably savvy enough to mount a clean up effort to get those links removed and/or file a disavow request with Google (which basically tells them to ignore those links)

Ironically, Eric Schmidt once tried to scrub Google of unfavorable search results about himself, and he was told they do not do that for individual results. ;)

The crappy part about this is that people can do this to sink competitors. Why bother lowering your prices? Just spend a few hundred dollars to have spammers plaster links to competitors on hacked sites... :(

>Sudden changes are usually the function of 'action' rather than 'inaction'

This is not necessarily true and I have plenty of first hand experience. Also Webmaster tools is useless if they were not directly affected by a spam penalty.

> Did she not actually update the content for the last 5 years (including Copyright notice) so it doesn't appear to be a dead site.

That's a function of inaction however.

Moral: don't base your income on something as volatile as your Google ranking

That's a pretty unrealistic moral in the face of the reality of how the consumer web works.

I mean, I get the whole "don't depend on another company for your revenue" (e.g. apps in the Apple app store), but you're saying "don't count on Google sending traffic to your site".

Plus, her ranking didn't change -- her site vanished out of the index.

EDIT: Unless you mean "don't depend entirely on organic traffic"? I can sorta see that... but, again, if I've only now thought about putting a photo on a quilt (which is a new idea to me), around 70% of the US thinks putting [photo quilts] into Google is the way to get the site you want. What else would you suggest?

EDIT #2: Maybe "vanished" is too strong a word, since it does show up on string matches. But it was deindexed for search terms it used to rank for.

What's wrong with Google's search results? If I search for any of these terms, I get plenty of relevant results.

The article is just idiotic in its accusations. Google wants to provide the best search experience for customers. If it makes a mistake, it hurts Google, so I'd imagine they sorta try to keep their results as good as possible. Complaining that you moved in indexes seems sorta pointless. Google's algorithms, at the moment, think other sites are a better match. Maybe she unknowingly engaged in some blacklistable offense.

It's like complaining that some hotel concierge stopped referring people to your restaurant.

That was never my point. In fact, I didn't say anything was "wrong" with the results at all. I just pointed out that saying "that's what you get for depending on Google for organic traffic" is more like saying "that's what you get for depending on oxygen" web-wise. It just ignores the reality of the web today.

It's safe to say, at this point, that we don't know why her site isn't showing up for the common terms it showed up for before.

EDIT: This comment has some good info on why her site might've been penalized: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6891141

How did you infer the site was deindexed? They said specifically by typing the URL of the site, it would show up.

From the site:

"...but if you look for photo quilts or any similar search term, Portrait Quilts — which for years was always the top result — no longer appears."

I'm being a little imprecise, but her site was deindexed for a bunch of search terms that she used to rank highly for.

based on how misinformed the author was in general on the subject, I think its more likely the site dropped off the first few pages of results. Since it still came up when you search for the domain, it can't be deindexed.

Again, apologies for the imprecision. But you'd agree that it has been delisted for search terms it used to do well for?

Additionally, far less than <1% of the people who use Google get past the second page of results. Getting your ranking penalized by twenty spots is a death sentence.

The site did not vanish. Go search for a snippet of text on the site, and it shows up right there.

Edit: Even for "portrait quilts" in quotes, her site shows up on the 8th page for me (opened incognito window to limit customization).

That's interesting data. Incognito ["portrait quilts"] and it doesn't rank on the first two pages for me, which is why I felt safe putting in my comment in the first place.

Maybe it's a quibble, but most humans don't put quotes in their search terms.

I wonder if they tried to resubmit their site to the index?

True, that would be an inaction.

I disagree with your moral though, a moral would suggest a choice, and it would be difficult to not depend on Google for exposure here since they are the dominant source of identification. It is perhaps a poor choice to depend on Google for 'organic' exposure however.

This is a report going into detail about the site and the violations to Googles terms with regards manipulative links:

http://linkaudit.co.uk/blog/did-cringely-call-out-google-as-...