Is Your Business Blog Still in Google's Index?

Our Weblogs Guide, Deborah Ng, reports that one of her blogs has been dropped by Google. If you rely on search engine rankings to drive traffic to your site, a change in Google's algorithms can literally break (or if you're lucky, make) your business overnight. And Google is constantly changing their search algorithms to try to produce better search results for its users.

At the moment, Google is particularly focused on "splogs" (spam blogs), and are working to reduce them. One part of the algorithm for doing that seems to be that of looking for duplicate content and penalizing or removing it when found. Of course, this has potential implications for legitimate blogs that get syndicated, as well as people using article marketing as a promotional tool. Unfortunately, it seems that Google may be having a hard time detecting which content is the original source, and some blogs or other sites may be incorrectly penalized.

Problogger Darren Rowse has some excellent tips on what to do if your Google rank falls (or you get removed entirely).

Also, if your blog is hosted on Blogspot (Blogger's hosted service), it's very possible that it may be Google's own efforts to reduce splogs on Blogspot that's causing the problem, as Jordan McCollum explains:

Let’s just make sure we’re clear here: Blogger, owned by Google, is inserting code to delete blogs from search engines’ indices when they don’t want to be deleted. What is this, a convenient way to remove splogs and hope that legit bloggers find the code and fix it?

So if you haven't checked your Google rankings in a while, now might be a good time to.