My Personal Tragedy Should Teach You! Ahhhhh! Websites Are Fragile!

[noah.whitmore]

Hi guys and gals,

I just wanted to share this with someone! Even if someone makes fun of me, perhaps it will remind everyone how FRAGILE our websites are...


So, two nights ago I finally uploaded 70 're-coded' pages of my main money site. I was very afraid to do it, but the code was getting ugly and slowing the site down. After I uploaded the new pages, I felt good about it.

But, this morning I took a look at Traffic Travis and was shocked to find that my HOMEPAGE WAS OUT OF GOOGLE!

I expected that the 're-code' would temporarily cost me a few ranks, but it was GONE! Totally Out Of Google! I even tried the 'site:' search handler and it confirmed that other pages were indexed but my homepage was completely gone!

I freaked out, obviously. I started frantically looking all over the place for a solution and couldn't figure it out! I even fetched the site as Googlebot in Webmaster Tools - could not figure it out.

After pulling my hair out and finding, through Analytics, that I had about a 40% drop in visitors yesterday, I was looking at the code and that's when I saw...

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">

Right there in the header of my main cash cow site! I couldn't believe it.

Turns out that I had used the disclaimer page as a template for some of the 're-code' and hadn't thought to remove the robots tag! Luckily only 35 of the 70 pages that I re-worked were effected!

Let me my mistake TEACH YOU!

Websites are a fragile thing! Ahh, I'm a bum! haha


-Noah Whitmore

[mince001]

wow...that must have been quite a hit to your online income if that was your main site. I tend to try and make the websites exacly as I want them from the begining, so that I do not experience issues later on when editing code...Google can go mental sometimes lol

[James-]

I'm glad you found that out reasonably quickly, and thank goodness it was a simple fix in the end!

[paulgl]

Yeah man that sucks big time. I feel your pain.

Sometimes it's better to leave well enough alone.

On one of my main cash cows, for two days before yesterday
my income dropped in half. Page views the same. By accident
I noticed that when I was playing with images/text adsense, I
inadvertently had made one block (the best block) image only.

Changed it and the income almost immediately went back up.
2 days of lost money sucked.

Look at the bright side. You caught it quick AND you learned a
lesson.

Paul

[YasirYar]

Sorry to hear that, and thanks for the heads up. I've recently had a competitor get a penalty from Google as well and he is nowhere to be seen in the rankings. Had me paranoid for a good couple of months

[noah.whitmore]

Glad no one has gone the route of 'na-na-na-na-boo-boo' and so forth, haha.

Definitely no fun. It was a site that I inherited a while back and I've been wanting to re-code it from the way it was when I received it. I'm usually all about, 'if it aint broke, don't fix it'. But, I couldn't resist. It was made with XSitePro - very ugly code, IMHO.

-Noah

[markowe]

D'oh - can happen to anyone. I am a bit reluctant to convert some of my static html sites to Wordpress for fear of screwing up or just taking a random rankings hit. I imagine your site will return eventually but it could take a while. Let's hope not, and it just pops back up. Unless you are competing with me of course - it's not in the toilet seat warmers niche, is it?

[JamesGw]

Good thing you found that quickly. Could have been bad.

[usearchme2]

lol least u managed to resolve it !

Im sure we have all done stupid things with out site before.

Woc

[paulgl]

Originally Posted by noah.whitmore

Glad no one has gone the route of 'na-na-na-na-boo-boo' and so forth, haha.

-Noah

Contrary to popular belief, people here WANT people to succeed...

Paul

[noah.whitmore]

Glad everyone's feelin' this with me. Haha. I am very glad that I caught it quickly. I imagine that my homepage will probably be back within the day or so. It was #1 for several keywords with 2 million+ competition, so I must have been doing something right.

Probably won't be back up there at #1 right away, but I have confidence!

-Noah

[1byte]

Hi Noah, yeah bummer, that really sucks bro...glad you figured it out. Hope your ranking comes back real fast...

Jesse

[AlphaWarrior]

Wow, don't you feel dumb? But don't feel like the Lone Ranger.

I have done things like that as well and I feel completely stupid when I find the mistake. And then, I am glad that that was the problem, I fixed it, and that there was not a major problem that I could not fix.

[noah.whitmore]

See? There is a lesson to be learned in here... somewhere... I just have to find it...

I think it's something like - When things go haywire, the problems are usually not as big as you suspect. But unfortunately the results, in the IM world, can be quite severe. Google has enough sites that rank for my keywords, they really don't care about mine. They probably wouldn't even care if I asked really nicely and took Google out on a date... to a steak house.

-Noah

[1byte]

Originally Posted by noah.whitmore

They probably wouldn't even care if I asked really nicely and took Google out on a date... to a steak house.

-Noah

He he...if it were only that easy!

[XIIIzen]

This one took me by surprise, as I was reading I didn't thought just one line of code would damage you as bad as that one. I sure hope it returns soon.

It may be a good time to study a bit after this whole problem, you could study how much time will it take to come back and if it will need additional backlinking or not. There are a lot of possibilities to learn from this tragedy. Still I sure wish it a safe return to the top positions it belongs to.

[gmcdonald]

Very generous confessions, I'll keep it in mind

[noah.whitmore]

Update: My homepage is not back in Google yet. I had my fingers crossed that it would be up for tomorrow. But, eh.

So far, I have removed the culprit META tag. Then, I logged into Google Webmaster Tools and fetched my site as Google bot, then I was given the option to submit the site back to Google, which I did.

I posted a link to my homepage in an update at identi.ca (like Twitter, it used to be do-follow, not sure about that anymore) and I pinged that update. I don't want to do too much. I'm sure that it will come back on it's own.

Thanks for all the good thoughts. Man, when you're down, you're down.

-Noah

[JSProjects]

I'm terrified to make changes to a site once it's up and running & established.

This thread does not help.

Hope everything turns out OK on your end. Keep up posted.

[noah.whitmore]

Originally Posted by JSProjects

I'm terrified to make changes to a site once it's up and running & established.

Yep - I went against my better judgement when I decided to do it. But, I'm planning on really focusing on this site throughout the rest of the year, so I wanted to get the re-code done before it really took off... see how well that turned out for me.

By the way, I'm guessing I'll need some link love to get it back up, and I enjoy your comments on the forum here, so I bought your link list from your sig. Quality stuff man, seriously! Thanks.

-Noah

[1byte]

Hey Noah, just a thought, but have you thought about driving some Adwords or other PPC traffic to your website while it recovers? I know it will cost more than free organic rankings, but at least you'll get some traffic in the meantime. Just a thought....

Jesse

[noah.whitmore]

Originally Posted by 1byte

Hey Noah, just a thought, but have you thought about driving some Adwords or other PPC traffic to your website while it recovers? I know it will cost more than free organic rankings, but at least you'll get some traffic in the meantime. Just a thought....

Jesse

I like the way you think! That's why I'm planning on sending you some articles tonight - that, and the fact that you ordered them from me.

Seriously though, good idea. Hadn't considered it, but I do have about $150 in my Adwords account and it's just sitting there.

-Noah

[1byte]

Originally Posted by noah.whitmore

I like the way you think! That's why I'm planning on sending you some articles tonight - that, and the fact that you ordered them from me.

-Noah

Darn! You mean with that great advice you got from me, you're not going to send me some free ones? Ha ha, of course you know I'm just kidding!

BTW fellow warriors here's an unsolicited plug for Noah's article writing service, coming from my own personal experience:

If you need some top quality articles, Noah is the very best - and I mean THE VERY BEST!

The last couple of years he has written hundreds of articles for me, and he always does a bang-up job. I've used several other article writers/services in the past, but Noah has written consistently good articles, whether for article marketing purposes, blog posts, or for my own site.

So, next time you need a few articles, give Noah a tryout. You won't be disappointed!