De-indexed!?

Update: I decided I had absolutely nothing to lose by e-mailing them, and everything to lose by not not e-mailing them. So I sent a short reply the Adsense support e-mail I'd gotten, asking what infraction I'd unwittingly created that led my site being de-indexed after applying for Adsense, and stating my willingness to correct whatever mistake made in the hope of being re-indexed.

Best case scenario: they actually reply, with something specific enough to act on, I correct it and my site again gets re-indexed. No matter how long the odds, its better than doing nothing and always wondering why without ever having tried out to find out the reason why

Worst case scenario: I get no reply, or nothing specific enough that I can remedy. I then post one final message stating that as a result of my site being de-indexed for reasons unknown... this project has been discontinued and will no longer be updated.

I then sever every tie to it I have, treating it as the total Fukurama, and completely start over from scratch and with no Google anything: no Blogger, and nothing connected to the new site through G-mail.

I'd begun building seed money toward future projects, and have enough already for a cheap web host and domain service. I'll start over with that and Word Press, along with a new niche (as I developed this site I came up with several ideas for niches to research later; if it comes down to this, it'll just be sooner than later). This is NOT how I'd hoped to spend that little bit of seed money, as I'd earmarked my first goal (once I'd built enough up) toward using it for a membership here with its access to the War Room, being able to start new threads where member only restrictions apply, etc. If it comes to this, that'll be dropped down a notch in priority, with it becoming instead the first thing to use it toward after buying a domain and hosting. Not the end of the world by any stretch.

This is going to be a set back, but no more than that. I'm not giving up just because of this happening. Too often opportunities only arise after a failure has been overcome, whereas nothing ever develops from giving up just because you've fallen down the first time out.

Filing this under s--- happens.

Quick update, and maybe I'll get some feedback on it (hopefully):

Alexa and sbucciarel are right about it being the .co.cc sub-domain that was the cause of the de-indexing. That much is fully put to rest now.

I also noticed since then that Firefox - for the first time - flagged the website of the domain provider as "untrusted." When I logged in they had a "how to" for the first time (that I've seen) on how to set it up for Blogger: the kicker is that they used a series of step by step screen shots with their logo embedded on them. Not cool and I imagine that may have played a role in G de-indexing these URLs, with mine getting caught up in the sweep.

The AdSense application wouldn't have made a difference, any more than it might have taken a few days more to get caught in the sweep instead of getting jumped to the front of the line.

I've since decided to maintain it as is (and not kill it or move it), and try this approach instead: keep the url and site active, but post a prominent message notifying that by [insert arbitrary date] the will only be able to be accessed through Treating Migraines. Meantime it can also be accessed that way anyway, so I'll also encourage readers to bookmark it as that. Ideally this will be through a gadget or line of code that puts it up top. If Blogger doesn't have one, I'm pretty sure I can find something on the net somewhere that can do it.

On the forum I'm targeting for traffic, I'll simply modify the link there to the blogspot one. I might even add it back in my sig as that.

I'm operating on the theory here that once I build up link juice to the non .cc.co domain, get inbound traffic coming from .co.cc to switch over to using the blogspot URL, and finally disable the .co.cc entirely (I tried using it just to forward initially, but that is unworkable), I should get re-indexed as a blogspot domain.

This is a bit of hassle and has really messed up my day, but its the best solution I've come up with to balance between keeping the site alive, maintaining the traffic I'm getting now (instead of them getting a 401), and getting back into Google.

For that matter, the blogspot domain for it already IS in google, its just not being crawled because of the custom domain (but a search with site:treatingmigraines.blogspot.com does list it. Which makes sense: its not the site that's the problem, but the domain that points to it.

Anyway, apologies if this comes across at all as incoherent or rambling. Having spent the day feeling like I'm bailing the Titanic (make that rubber boat: the site is too small to be compared to the Titanic, and as my only site it has no lifeboats).

All of which has still strengthened my resolve toward launching the second site on my own host & domain, sooner than later as I'd originally hoped. Its no fun having all your eggs in basket when the basket's dropped, and your left to hope they haven't all cracked. I'll still maintain my original site, and continue to develop it That it shows up with the blogger site search has given me hope it can be salvaged.

Interesting.

I hadn't read anything yesterday about Google de-indexing all .co.cc domains, but a quick search just verified that there are none at all in their index.

Pretty big news, I guess, in a way. Lots of people used them.

Once again, though, it highlights the importance of being in control.

Regardless of how it looked, .co.cc isn't and never has been a proper TLD (or ccTLD), like, say, .co.uk; it's a privately registered domain, whose owner decided, off their own free will, to dish out free subdomains.

They don't and never have offered "real" registrations, and they're not in any way a legal / officially recognised domain registrar.

What I'm saying is that, yes, to an extent (i.e. in SEO terms), Google does treat subdomains as separate, individual entities, but from time to time they will de-index an entire domain and all subdomains under it if they consider the majority of the content across those domains to be in any way suspect/scammy/spammy.

All of about.com's subdomains, for example, are largely separate in SEO terms, but they're all subdomains of the main about.com domain (obviously), and if Google decided they were encouraging the use of b1ackh*t SEO methods among their "Guides" or whatever, or were just downright shady in their practices for some reason or other, then it's possible they'd de-index all of their subdomains.

Bam. All gone. Just like that. No more traffic through Google.

Notice, however, that they didn't, in this particular case, de-index all sites that utilise .cc domains: they're unlikely ever to de-index all domains across a particular TLD. In other words, it'd make no sense for Google to de-index all .biz, .info or .co.uk, .co or .cc domains, but it'd make perfect sense, given the right set of circumstances (which would be much more common), for them to de-index all blogspot.com, wordpress.com or <whateverfreeh0st.net> subdomains.

Honestly, for anyone looking to start up a site, free ad-free hosting is one thing (and can be easily switched), but I would absolutely not recommend using a free subdomain. You're at the mercy of just too many uncontrollable forces/parties, and could easily find yourself being punished for the actions of others, where you simply would not have been if you'd registered a real domain.

.TK domains are possibly much safer in this regard - they're "proper domains" at least - but I haven't read their policies and don't know their track-record as a registry (and/or registrar), in relation to deleting domains, etc.

For anyone looking to set up an online business who's pretty strapped for cash: if you can just about scrape something together for a cheap .info domain (or something like that - a real domain of which you're the legal registrant according to the registry's records), then do it!