I posted yesterday how some of my pages have disappeared from Googles index. I also mentioned how I tried to fix this issue (re-submitting sitemap, request broken links to be removed). Now, one day later the situation is as such:

This data from the Google Webmaster Tool actually means that currently not a single of my blog entries is listed in Google. And this in return explains one thing: why currently my site traffic is almost down to ZERO! I think this shows very impressively how dependet website and blog owners are of Google. If you’re not listed in the search engine nobody will find you! Of course this is especially true in the beginning of starting a blog where you don’t have any subscribers, other sites that link to your blog etc.

Now as you might imagine this situation is a little bit frustrating for me. But right now there is actually nothing I can do about it! The requests for content removal (all the broken links) is still pending, I double checked my robots.txt and meta information - all this seems to be correct. So right now the only thing I can do is to wait… I will keep you informed on how things evolve!

Blogging, Search Engine Optimization Google, Google Search, Google Webmaster Tool

I just tested another nice feature of Google I wasn’t aware of yet: Google Webmaster Tools. This is a set of tools developed for us webmasters to monitor and analyse all kind of stuff in relation to the Google search engine. Most relevant features I think are:

• See with what search terms your website appears and on what rank
• See what terms Googleboot thinks are relevant at your site
• Check errors that occured while indexing your site

It’s free to sign up and you can just enter the domains that you own. To access the full features you have to verify that you are the owner of the domains by uploading a randomly named HTML file and have Google download it (beware your .htaccess which might restrict access to it!).

Fore more info check out this nice article: Grow your Studio with Google Webmaster Tools.

If you like the Google Webmaster Tools you should definitely have a look at Google Analytics as well. It’s another great tool for webmasters that can be used for free and that allows you to analyse the traffic that you get to your webpage. I have written a little summary on how to use it and it’s main features, which you can view here.

Search Engine Optimization Google Search, Google Webmaster Tools