JLH Design

A little housekeeping note here. I find that I am also interested in what other people have said on sites I visit such as Search Engine Rountable and Sphinn. I like having to not have to click through all of the articles to see what readers have recently added. To that end I’ve added my own page with the 40 latest comments and a sizable snippet. I’ll have to do some formatting changes to the page as it’s just a call to a simple sidebar widget right now but the basic data is available now.  Besides I had to see what February 29th looked like in this post.

Google’s Webmaster Help used to say:

What can I do if I’m afraid my competitor is harming my ranking in Google?

There’s almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you’re concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question.

Located at: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34449&topic=8524

That page now offers up a 404.

I noticed this a couple weeks ago and have been watching it, but it appears to be permanent. It’s possible that they just moved it renamed URLs, so I did some searching for keywords in the old help topic:

1. Harming
2. Harm
3. Competitor

None of those searches return anything that resembles the old statement.I haven’t heard anything official on this and am quite nervous about speculating that it’s a de facto way of acknowledging that a competitor can indeed harm you, for example buying tons of spammy paid links and reporting the site. Just because a speed limit sign was there last week and isn’t now doesn’t mean that you can go as fast as you’d like.

I find it kind of odd…

Update:  Hat tip to Barry Schwartz for pointing out that the statement is still available here. ( Screenshot )

There are million of various theories out there about how to find out if your site is penalized by Google. I thought I’d recap what Google officially says, and by officially I mean on their domain and bearing their brand. Their help system is a bit scattered so I may have missed some.

1. Verify that your site ranks for your domain name (reference)

Do a Google search for www.[yourdomain].com. If your site doesn’t appear in the results, or if it ranks poorly in the results, this is a sign that your site may be penalized for violations of the webmaster guidelines.

Brian White of Google notes that inside Google the nomenclature with the brackets used above indicates what is actually typed in the search box. So when they say to search for www.[yourdomain].com, they actually mean that you would search for yourdomain and not include the www, com, or the surrounding dots.

2. Message Center (reference 1, reference 2)

If we find certain problems with your site - for example, malware - we’ll let you know via the Message Center

we launched Message Center in our webmaster console, which allows us to send messages to verified site owners.

3. PageRank of Zero (reference 1, reference 2)

Google believes the site violates our Webmaster Quality Guidelines.

4. Removed from the index (reference 1 , reference 2 , there are more but you get the point)

If a site has been penalized, it may no longer show up in results on Google.com or on any of Google’s partner sites.

and

if our review indicated that you engaged in deceptive practices and your site has been removed from our search results

5. Noted on your Summary Page (reference)

Your page has been blocked from our index because it does not meet the quality standards necessary to assign accurate PageRank. We cannot comment on the individual reasons your page was removed. However, certain actions such as cloaking, writing text in such a way that it can be seen by search engines but not by users, or setting up pages/links with the sole purpose of fooling search engines may result in permanent removal from our index.

Note: Emails from Google were stopped in August 2007 due to spoofers and scammers.

I’ve seen quite a few people in Google’s webmaster help group ask how to verify their site for webmaster tools when using a Googlepages website. I took a cursory look and couldn’t find any online documentation so I tried it myself. The procedure I used is outlined below with screen shots. There may be a better way out there, but I know this one works.

1. First sign into Webmaster Tools and go to the dashboard where you will see a box to add your site. Type in your googlepages sites name here, just mysite.googlepages.com, with no ‘/home’ or any other subfolders or file names.

2. You’ll then be prompted with a link as the next step to verify your site, click that.

3. They will then ask you for a method to verify with a pull down that says, “choose verification method…” You’ll want to select the “Upload HTML File” Method.

4. After you’ve chosen your method, the next screen will show you a file name. This is the file you will need to create to upload to your Googlepages site. I just highlighted the file name, opened up my text editor application (in my case its notepad), then picked ’save as’, when prompted for the name I pasted the file name that Google gave me, and hit save. The file can be blank like that, as Google is only going to look for its existence, not what’s in it.

5. In another tab or another browser session open up your Googlepages account, and under your site manager, to the right you’ll see a box appropriately name “uploaded stuff.” Select the link [upload] (if you have files there already) or select the ‘browse’ button. You’ll then need to browse to the location of the file you saved in the previous step.

6. The final step is to go back to your Webmaster Tools account and click the ‘verify’ button. The response should be almost instant where you will see the verified screen. Now go and enjoy all the benefits that being a verified owner of a site offers you.