Blog | We’re back! (almost) |
Today, I receieved a notice that our site for Ahadada Books (www.ahadadabooks.com) had violated Google’s quality guidelines. Here’s the note:
While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages were using techniques that are outside our quality guidelines . . . this appears to be because your site has been modified by a third party. Typically, the offending party gains access to an insecure directory that has open permissions. Many times, they will upload files or modify existing ones, which then show up as spam in our index.
What had happened was that Google had discovered some hidden text appended to our site’s template—referring mostly to erectile dysfunction medication, et al.
In order to preserve the quality of Google’s search engine, pages from ahadadabooks.com were removed temporarily from its search results. I’ve now corrected the problem and have contacted Google to be reconsidered. Hopefully, we’ll be relisted soon.
Essentially, Google flexed its muscles and suspended Ahadada Books from its search engine because of a perceived attempt to artificially boost its popularity ranking.
Something similar happened to BMW Germany, following the German car manufacturer’s attempts to game the Google index. The major difference here was that the Ahadada Books site was a victim of foul play, whereas BMW Germany had made concerted efforts to game the system.
Regardless, the move illustrates the fact that one company has a lot of power over a website’s access to the public. While the methods used by BMW were a violation of the search engine’s guidelines, and not something that we at Ahadada Books endorse, we look forward to re-inclusion in Google; hopefully, very soon!
Despite the setback, traffic at Ahadada Books has stayed pretty consistent!
