Pribek

Quiz Question:

What do “Animal Farm” by George Orwell, the Bible, 2 Live Crew, “The Communist Manifesto” by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, DDT, Frank Zappa’s single “I Don’t Wanna Get Drafted.”, The Weavers and pribek.net have in common?

Answer:

They have all been banned or censored.

Some have been banned by governments or censored by institutions or media outlets. Me, this website, banned by Google.

Here’s an article from Pandia that explains this called, appropriately, “Banned By Google”.

There are those that wake up one morning and find that all of their web pages has disappeared from the Google index. Others find that Google has removed one page at the time, finally ending up with the home page, and then: none at all.

A Google ban can also be more subtle. The pages remain in the Google database, but they end up at page 722 for all relevant search queries.

If they had good rankings before, this is more likely than not caused by the wrath of the world’s mightiest search engine.

Yep, that’s what happened. It’s funny because, about a month ago my traffic had started to increase dramatically. The increase was coming from search traffic and, primarily Google. Then, ten days ago, it went in the tank. It dropped to a third of what it had been. I noticed that the regulars seemed to be still hanging around so, I tried an experiment. I did Google searches using the keywords, Pribek, Jack Pribek and pribek.net. Now, I don’t optimize very well on a lot of key words or phrases but those three right there…I usually have that turf pretty well sowed up.

Give it a try, use Pribek, Jack Pribek and pribek.net on a Google search then, try the same search at another engine.

Why does this happen? Well, from what I understand, there could be legit tech reasons but, check this out.

However, more likely than not you have done something that is in violation with Google’s written or un-written anti-spam regulations. That is: There is something about your site that leads Google to believe that you are trying to unduly influence your search engine rankings.

“Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, ‘Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?’”

What website am I competing with?

Here’s something I know about the highly touted Google algorithms that are the cutting edge of technology; they don’t work for this site. Last year, I tried the Google ads on this site.

Here’s how it’s supposed to work; I write a blog post and an ad pops up next to it that is relevant to what I wrote about thus, delighting the reader so much that they click on the ad and buy some crap.

Here’s how it worked; If I mentioned say, Adolf Hitler one day then, three days later I wrote about a fried catfish recipe, there would be “find Hitler items at eBay” next to the fish recipe. That’s not going to work. The ads were consistently three days behind on “relevancy”. Since I write about whatever goes through my mind or interests me temporarily, at any given moment, the topics and content outrun the mother of all algorithms.

I just looked it up; during the time I ran AdSense I had…

8,127 Impressions

5 clicks

Earned $0.89

Now, I’m pretty sure that if I wrote about tulips every day, the ads would be relevant. But, then you wouldn’t need the algorithm.

So, if this is the same cutting edge stuff that’s in play here, that is leading Google to believe that I’m “trying to unduly influence my search engine rankings” then, so be it.

The world keeps on turning, you know?

So, to the GoogleBot that I know is looking at this page, as you are reading it, right now; I got a message for you Bot, Live From The Winnebago…

I’ll keep you posted, if there are any developments.

I just read an article in The Guardian about concern over the data that Google will be able to compile on individuals in the future. I am pretty sure that cow has been out of the barn for a while. I just looked at my site statistics and the Googlebot has visited 31 times this month so far. I don’t know what this friendly little “bot” is looking for and it makes me uneasy. There are several other “bots” or “spiders” snooping around as well. If these things are paying this much attention to my little corner of cyberspace, I wonder what information they have in total.

I feel a little weird when I see a camera at an intersection, and being able to find a satellite photo of my house on the internet makes me concerned.

I was worn out all day yesterday. I think it was a combination of jet-lag and side effects from the M.S. medication. I went to bed at around 9:30 but I woke up at 4:00 feeling like $100 and finished a song that I have been writing. I was able to record and mix a demo of the song by 8:00, which is the beauty of digital recording for a songwriter. I wonder if the Googlebot knows about it, he/she/it will soon I guess.

I have been reading an interesting book, “Songwriters On Songwriting” by Paul Zollo. As the title suggests it is a collection of conversations with many great writers. I am not very far into it but have picked up some insight. I would recommend it to anyone interested in writing songs.

I just found a link that allows you to view a website as if you were a Googlebot. I typed in the url for this site and it looks pretty benign, but I am going to keep an eye on this. I wonder if there is a way to “bot” the “Googlebot”.