On September 16th, 2006 uncommondescent.com was mysteriously dropped from indexing by google.com. Deindexing means that any google search would never return a hit to uncommondescent.com. We became blogona non grata at google. We were never given a reason beyond we were in violation of webmaster guidelines. Not knowing how, we tried everything we could think of to fix it, including the new WordPress Theme “Cutline”, a sitemap, and shutting down an unauthorized mirror site (antievolution.org/buud).
We know that google reevaluated us after all this (it’s in the webmaster report) and we were still not reindexed. The next automatic cycle for evaluations was coming up in December but we had nothing new to try so we held out little hope. Then we decided to start blogging about the problem on sites that were still indexed. Denyse led that campaign beginning just last week. Then all of a sudden after just a few days of putting the word out we were just as mysteriously reindexed by google. I suspect what happened is that someone who knew someone had us manually delisted in September. In November someone reading Denyse’s blog who happened to be a stockholder at Google contacted google investor relations and asked them to explain why a major blog with a pagerank of 6/10, a blog with tens of thousands of legitimate links (many from prominent educational institutions), a blog over a year old run by a famous author and professor, was deindexed. Given my experience at another famous company which cared mightily about its stockholders, knowing that investor relations can get to the bottom of things very quickly at such corporations, I’d guess someone finally looked into the matter and quickly did the right thing by reindexing us.
Many thanks to Denyse O’Leary for getting the word out and many more thanks to Micah Sparacio (our behind the scenes technical guru) for expressing so clearly what needed to be said. Way to go, team!