MV4MEN Blog - Does Google's punishment fit the crime?

A short while ago I submitted and published  an article here at articlebase on a simple way of improving your individual blog posting rankings on search engines - mainly google - through adding some code to the template page of your blog which allows you to provide metatags for title, description and keywords for each individual blog post. Previously I had pointed out that the one big disadvantage of blog optimization is that through using a template all postings are treated as having the same descriptions and titles. You can also implement the keywords metatag as I pointed out in the article but this is of little effect as even Matt Cutts, the guru of google search, has admitted on his blog that the google search bot is much more sophisticated in finding the keywords and simply ignores the keywords metatag. Fair enough as I could fill these tags with words which are of little relevance to my blog or posting.

So to continue the happy story there I was blogging along and patting myself daily on the back for the rankings I was getting on google for the blog postings - they were high - first and second page rank. Google loved me.

Then disaster struck. Or rather I struck disaster. Innocently I decided my blog needed a new look so I decided on another blogger template with different colors and fonts and pressed the famous red button thus unwittingly blowing my blog out of google existence very quickly. My male underwear online store disappeared from the first 9 pages of google for all my keywords. I think google calls it the 90 penalty meaning if you have done something naughty, all your postings will not appear in the first 90 listings - i.e. forcing me back to page 10. WHY, I asked. I even asked google to reconsider last August - they are still considering.

And what was the crime of which I was guilty. De facto in importing the new template I had deleted all the customized titles for some 100 blog postings. The new template had deleted all my customization work - never to be retrieved. Through prolonged searching on the web, I discovered that google interpreted my mistake as simply changing all my page titles and they take a VERY dim view of this. They see it as tricking them into re-indexation.

So fellow bloggers a word of warning - should you have customized your blog posting metatags in the template - save these somewhere before deciding to change your template. I paid and still pay a very high price. I had read that this is a temporary penalty which would lift after the next google indexation round. It didn't and my blog's traffic has dwindled to a pitiful traffic.