In my spare time I do non profit research in the area of living systems. I have seven years work, I would like to present online to attract people to join in for growth and critics. One way I thought this could happen is through keyword seaching. A previous test online had a blog on a subtopic. This presented novel aspects of the racism argument, and rose very rapidly in MSN search and google. This is because I took the debate round relevant high ranking forums, posting links to the blog. The pages and domain of the blog were keyword relevant, (as the blog engine generated subpages based on the title of the article using dashes) e.g. Nameofblog.com/i-propose-two-distinct-types-of-racism.html SO I had no need to hide the page names under keywords, which is unpopular. Things were going well with the blog appearing under dozens of search combination under google, and rising to the top five in many of those. At one stage the blog and forum debates on it dominated a whole page on particular combinations of words. Blogger.com (owned by google) asked me to upgrade, and migrated the blog content to another server. The domain names are identical but either the pointing underneath them is not, or just a few hours of downtime during re-indexing wipes content from google. In a day all those hard debated links were wiped of google (but not msn search to this day half a year later) and have not returned. That was extremely disheartening. The idea was to see if I could make my mark on the internet through hard won debate and reputation. People read the content because the concept I presented generated a buzz with the forum threads growing to thousands of readers very quickly. And those readers clicked through to the blog out of interest. This kind of thing is not repeatable. When you present original concepts it is dynamic like presenting a stunning new car design. “ooooh ahhhâ€, then things settle down. Its not a business with a periodic demand regenerating that amount of traffic. It seems like it is not possible to keep dynamic web presence alive online, with non commercial projects, that do not constantly re-enforce themselves. (like business does) I’ve got my main project which are ready as online books and tutorials. It’s a kind of lifes work on neurology and complexity theory. My aim is for it to be available as a solid marker on its own area (as it begins a new paradigm) until something else beats it, or I’m refuted and the work is negated, so nobody reads it. That’s also fair enough. I don’t like what happened with google at all. (in fact I’ve noticed a lot of good content the kind which founded the internet years ago, has disappeared of google in many areas due to re-indexing, and its not been replaced by anything better, buried beyond page limits under dead commercial links.) Links should be restored if a server goes down during a critical period when google links are being re-indexed. I know the internet is a wild west, but this is no fair fight.. The only thing that should have wiped me off the web, is if a whole load of newer links were generated on that topic which generated new traffic. That’s fair. I would consider myself beaten in competition. Conceptually what has occurred with google is like losing your credit rating because you missed a payment, due to some glitch obscurity with the banks operations. (happens quite often). From a technical point of view do mirror sites solve web presence in the face of re-indexing ? (which you never know when is going to happen) SO if I want a long standing web presence that beats commercial waste litter, I basically have to use networks to fight networks, by paying a server firms a fee for years of stable uptime. Are there server firm that are always about and retains pages ? (I still have yahoo pages online that were up seven years ago, but that’s not exactly a proper site.) If I do that I wouldn’t be getting web presence on merit, maybe it’s a necessary evil, like paying an advertising agent, but you still need good product. Currently it seems like the networking of the internet is best suited for commercially presented content. In my work I investigated living networks. What happened is almost analogous to aspects of that, but i'll save you that. In a way I am thinking what happened here might be a predictable aspects of networks themselves. Trying to maintain a web presence based just on the dynamic interests generated by creative content might now be an impossibility.
Thank you for a clearly written and concise article. You're right, a lot of good content gets drowned out by the shouting of idiots (see the popularity of YouTube, for example). On bad days I'm a pessimist - I see a lot of good stuff getting buried by crap. On good days, though, I'm optimistic about the internet, long-term. In time, I think we will have helped create a digital repository of knowledge that previous generations can only dream of. My advice is to not lose hope: in time, the ranking for your blog should gradually return, if it had indeed ranked for the 'right' reasons in the first place. I would recommend finding your own hosting, however - depending on someone else's promises just doesn't cut it, as far as I'm concerned. Buy a domain name and spring for some cheap - but reliable - hosting.
I think this long post really not for most DP member (since they don't read long post) but for google engineers to think again.
I didn't respond yesterday because there are people here much more expert in these things. But what you're describing really shouldn't happen, and usually doesn't - a few hours downtime can cause a bit of a problem, but not one that lasts for months on end. Are you completely sure that you don't have a 'bad' robots.txt file or similar? It might be worth joining google/webmasters if you haven't already and seeing if they are reporting any problems with your site. Is your site still in the index or has it been removed? Google webmasters also now shows most of the links they know about to your site, which could be useful to you. When you say all the links have disappeared that doesn't really make sense to me. Are the physical links still on the forums etc where you posted them, still without "nofollow" and still linking to pages that are valid on your site (try backlinkwatch.com to check)? Did you change anything - metatags / titles / filenames etc? Change the menu system to javascript? Change url without doing a 301 redirect? Start buying or selling links to 'bad neighbourhoods? Change to a CMS that has made all the header info identical across all pages? There are a lot of things that can cause problems for a site, and commercial competition is only one of them. It's pretty unusual for a genuine, well-established site with lots of valid links to disappear so dramatically so my guess is something has gone wrong in the transfer procedure, rather than competition has driven you out. Sorry if you're a techie and already know about all this stuff - it wasn't clear from your post. Cheers