Hard Lessons! Follow no more!

Today, I'm a bit disappointed because this blog seems to have been delisted at Google. And that includes my feedburner link that was in the top 3 for the keyword 'Internet Wealth Code' for the past few weeks. (maybe someone got jealous and flagged my blog as objectionable!)

Fortunately, blogger did not close my blog but I've no idea why that should happen since I'm putting in original content plus non-objectionable ones. The only thing that I suspect could be because some of the words I use in my blog tend to be 'hot' keywords that spammers tend to use. I was told 'S'E-O' or "searc'h e'ngine" are pretty hot terms. (I wonder if those trick of putting other characters in between words really work but I'm sure those bots are getting smarter by the day)

The other reason could be because I accidently accepted comments from a spammer that pointed to objectionable links from my blog. I had turn on the moderation of comments and wanted to delete them but accidently accepted them instead and got them all published.
For more about comment spam, check out this post at GoogleBlog
Nevertheless, ALWAYS turn on comment moderation to ensure no comment spams gets through. Just make sure you are not half-asleep when doing the moderation like yours truly.

A teacher of mine suggested it's also possible if Google finds too many affiliate links in one site
to delist the site. Hmm, well, perhaps. I'm still puzzled why I got delisted after being there for more than 3 months.

If really that is the case, then a tip he gave would be useful. In the GoogleBlog post I mentioned earlier, this was also highlighted.

As you know the search sites have things call search bots (check wikipedia for more explanation) that crawls website for links etc. It also happens to be the one that raise red flags if it find something it doesn't like.

So if really it is the case of detecting too many affiliate links on my blog (which shouldn't be the case because I didn't had THAT many!), then maybe it would be a good idea to put the rel="nofollow" in those links. That would ensure the bot don't crawl to those sites.

An example courtesy from the GoogleBlog

Visit my <a href="http://www.example.com/" rel="nofollow">discount pharmaceuticals</a> site.


Good idea also to use this nofollow for links pointing to your 'ThankYou' pages where you normally put bonuses after they have opted-in etc! You really don't want those pages to be indexed and searchable, do you?

-The Hunz-