Last week, my haiku site, tinywords, appeared as the 30th-40th result on a search for haiku on Google. This week, it’s not in the top 500. What happened?
I think Google is punishing me for mentioning the word “haiku” too many times in a previous post, which I admit I did in a fit of pique. Is this a permanent banishment, or have I just been sent to purgatory? Who knows? There’s no way I can find out, and the Great Oz is silent on the matter.
Sigh. You just can’t win with Google, folks.
UPDATE 3/30/06: It seems tinywords is back at #38 or 39. The disappearance was temporary. Thank goodness! I take back all the bad things I said about you, Google. I still like you.
Thane pointed this out to me, and you seem to be at about the 35th result when I conduct that search, even from your link there. I guess it was a temporary glitch or something.
Oh, but if Thane asks, tell him I fixed it for you — I’m trying to convince him that I have godlike powers over the internet… 🙂
I see you around 30th or 40th place for [haiku], so I wouldn’t assume that you’d been blacklisted by Google. To be fair, that’s a pretty general term (lots of people have things like haiku generators, DeCSS in haiku form, and it’s evidently the name of an operating system too).
For the search [daily haiku], I see you at #2, which is pretty good. You’re behind dailyhaiku.com, but just ahead of USA Today’s daily haiku. In my professional opinion as a Google engineer, I’d say your site is probably doing okay.
Hey, Matt, thanks for the professional opinion — I really appreciate that. And Tom, go ahead and take credit. Your godlike powers are clearly at work. Subject to the approval of actual Google engineers, of course.
In defense of Tom’s godlike powers, he helped me bring the rank of our church’s new website above our church’s old web site. Whew!