Delisted by Google!

This site has been delisted by Google, and man, has the traffic plummeted.

Here’s what happened.

I use Ezoic on my site for advertising. I know ads are intrusive – use an ad blocker like Adblock Plus – but I try to minimize it by disabling ads on my recent blog posts.

Recently there was a configuration issue with Ezoic and my site wouldn’t load. Instead every page was replaced by a page entitled “Origin Error”. I don’t want to get into the technical details of what an origin error is. Suffice it to say that my entire site looked like that single page.

Google noticed this and said, hey, something’s really off with this site. Maybe it’s been hacked. Let’s remove it from our search listings just to be safe.

I fixed the issue by contacting my hosting provider, but by then the damage was done, and that sweet, sweet Google traffic vanished.

I have submitted a “reconsideration request” but they say it may take “several weeks” to be evaluated, so I am not holding my breath.

In the end, does it really matter? I suppose not. Maybe a little bit.

It won’t break me to lose most of the advertising income – it was about $1000 Canadian last year – but I write things so that people will read my words. If this site can’t be found in Google, less people will read here and I’ll miss that.

Hopefully the reconsideration request will go through quickly and I’ll get reinstated.

In the meantime, why not join my mailing list so you don’t rely on Google!

Update

Hey, we’re baaaack! It only took about 5 days to be relisted. Whew!