I love google. Lately it’s been bringing me lots of visitors. It brought me 55 yesterday, which is a pretty damn cool (and pretty good for a small site like this one). However, this past weekend when I messed up my .htaccess file, it brought me no one. In case you weren’t here: I screwed up my 301 redirect links and no one was able to access anything in the /software, /downloads, or /programming directories of this site (you were just redirected to one of my blog pages). I will now do a total site checkout after touching that file. I can’t believe I was that stupid.

Like an idiot I let this error sit around for a few days before I realized something was terribly wrong. That something wrong was that google was no longer bringing me traffic. I’d fallen in my page rank. I quickly fixed the error and my page rank mostly returned. However, my ranking for the term Patrick Gillespie seems to have disappeared. I was actually kind of hoping to grab the top spot from that stupid news article on the pervert named Patrick Gillespie. Though then again, it was my Tiburon entry that was climbing the top ten of that page, and I’m not so sure that article would look good next to one titled “Patrick Gillespie arrested for failing to register as a sex offender.”

Back to the topic at hand though. Luckily google forgave my foolish .htaccess blunder. I was reading an article on some other blog earlier this week where the site owner wasn’t as lucky:

Google Penalty Nightmare

Google penalizes sites for certain offenses. Usually this is because a site is trying to do something artificial to raise its page rank. But since google doesn’t tell these sites the reason they are penalized, no one can be sure why a page suddenly drops in its page rank – or in some cases, is removed from the search results. Sometimes you mess up and things go back to normal (like me), and sometimes you mess up and things are sucky for a decent amount of time (like the girl in the blog entry above).

I find the whole idea of a secret penalty system quite interesting. It makes sense that they wouldn’t release all of the details, because then people would know exactly what to try and get around. Not knowing what you’re up against means there are more mines you could potentially step on, and when those mines are things like being removed from google’s search results, you’re less likely to do something to try and cheat the system. At least that’s what I think their reasoning is.

Not surprisingly, webmasters have tried to understand this system and some have even put together lists of possible google penalty filters. Below is one such list:

Google Filters

Jargon you’ll need to know to understand that article:
SERPS = Search engine results pages
SEO = Search engine optimization

If you’re a webmaster, that article is worth reading. It’s even caused me to think twice about the naming of my “links” section – though it’s late now so I’ll rename it later.

Oh yeah, in case you’re wondering, the title of this entry is a reference to a famous Homer Simpson quote. I figured it would probably be a good idea to mention that :).