Janiss - 6:57 am on Jun 5, 2005 (gmt 0)

Well, this is interesting!

My small site that got dumped on by Google - like, a totally innocent site that is pretty much a personal site that generates only the slightest amount of income through ad words and a small product review section seems to have been penalized by Google!:

"Sorry, no information is available for the URL www.totallyinnocentsite.com" - although Google does offer to "Find web pages from the site www.totallyinnocentsite.com"

When I search on the keywords in its title, however, the domain actually does come up somewhere around page 3.

The seriously dumb thing is this is a site for my CAT, for god's sake! It wasn't exactly getting thousands of PVs a day. Sometimes hundreds. Of course now it gets traffic in the 2 digits with Bourbon. Why in a billion years would Google penalize a silly cat site?

This is really making me quite curious!

The one thing I do with this site that I don't do with the others, BTW, is call in the images by javascript to make it hard to steal them. (The site has tons of "cute" cat photos and I don't want them hotlinked or downloaded. If I didn't protect them, these images would probably wind up on a bunch of blogs.) If that's what's causing the problem, well, I'm not sure what to do, cause I do want to protect the pictures. Incidentally, someone else who does the same thing with some of his images (the guy I got the JS from) doesn't seem to be having a problem with Bourbon, and I imagine he'd have said something if he was.

I mean, this site doesn't even have that many pages - probably less than 75. It's anything but spammy. Google's never really been that hot on it - last I checked it was only PR4. (My main site - the "authority" site - is PR6.) But why Bourbon would bury my cat really puzzles me. This is one mystery I'd really like to solve.

And yes, I admit that I'm rather annoyed that Google has been mean to my kitty. :-)