NY Times Covers Blog Shutdown; Google Blocking Searches?
By Hillary Taft - Tuesday, July 1st, 2008
Well, Obamabots, whoever you are, those of you who flagged my blog when it was on Blogspot did me the biggest favor ever. Because since then, my blog traffic has gone way up, and I am now linked across the blogosphere. The New York Times just covered the incident (which includes a link to my old blog URL). So I hope your happy, because your juvenile behavior completely and totally backfired.
On a related note: I found some comments on the NY Times piece saying that Google has been blocking searches to anti-Obama websites. Here’s one of the comments:
My PrestoPundit blog — an anti-Obama site — has been delisted from Google search for several months now, and Google will not respond to my requests that I be relisted in their search engine.
Go to Yahoo and search for “Obama’s father” or Obama father socialism” and PrestoPundit pops up on the first page. You’ll notice that you won’t find PrestoPundit anywhere in the Google search engine when you type in those searches.
I had actually noticed that since I put up this new domain name, I have gotten absolutely zero traffic from Google search. Now, I know the domain is new, but I have also recently put up new domain names and had Google traffic within a day. (One of the reasons I like to have Google AdSense on my sites is that it ensures your site gets indexed quickly.) I have no way of checking my stats on Blogspot, but it does seem curious that I’m not getting Google traffic here yet.
I could just be paranoid at this point, so I will report back in a few weeks to see if anything has changed.
UPDATE: July 3
I have gotten a few hits from people searching “hillary or bust” on Google. So my site is definitely in Google’s search engine. I have not gotten any other Google traffic, however. This could be because my domain name was just put up a week ago. I will update this page again if something changes.
Tags: blogger, censorship, Google
July 1st, 2008 at 10:37 am
This is too late to help you but I’m passing the word around about a terrific how-to-get-a-blog-going site I found last weekend. I’ve tried three or four times to get a blog going but always hit a snag and gave up. I love computers but I gotta admit I don’t know much about them. That I cruised through the whole process (starting with the domain name) and ended up with streaming video an hour after I installed WordPress is simply a miracle. The “FLV Embed” plugin made the page code real easy and there’s a link (and instructions) on the site to some free AVI-to-FLV converter which worked like a charm. Here’s the site:
http://www.easy-blogsite.com
I also put it in the “Website” box so (I think) it’s embedded.
If you’re just getting into WordPress, yourself, you might take a look. He has some great plugins on it (check the editor) and you’ll definitely want to grab TinyMCEComments to replace the comments editor at some point.
If you want to help those who are bailing from Blogger and Blogspot, I can’t think of a better link. If it worked for me, it oughta work for anybody. You might pass it around a bit. There’s certainly no better time.
JimmyL
July 2nd, 2008 at 7:06 pm
If you want to embed a stat counter at you blog go to
http://my.statcounter.com/register.php
at blogger put it in the bottom of your template
at word press you have to put it in a text widget on your side bar.
I have one on both my blogs and you can get an invisible counter, that is what I have.