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Google responds to your individual questions on ranking

February 12, 2005

It’s possible to email Google inquiring about fluctuations in your ranking. Google will have a real person look at your question as well as your blog or Web site, and respond. Here’s Google’s contact page for search questions.

Google is not going to give specific search engine optimization advice. However, they will answer a question like I posed – that being if the wild fluctuations in LexBlog’s ranking and disappearing from search results from time to time were the result of being banned or penalized. Here’s how they responded after a couple weeks:

Thank you for your note. We apologize for the delayed response. We reviewed your site and can assure you that it is not currently banned or penalized by Google. As you may know, our search results change regularly as we update our index. The PageRank change you have observed is consistent with regular fluctuations in our search results.

We realize these changes can be confusing. However, these processes are completely automated and not indicative of wrong-doing or penalization of individual sites. We currently include over four billion pages in ourindex, and it is certainly our intent to represent the content of the internet fairly and accurately.

While we cannot guarantee that any page will consistently appear in our index or appear with a particular rank, we do offer guidelines for maintaining a ‘crawler-friendly’ site. You can find these guidelines at http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html. Following these recommendations may increase the likelihood that your site will show up consistently in the Google search results.

Regards,

The Google Team

I appreciated Google’s response. We still needed to work on search engine optimization but at least knew the common sense tactics we were using were not violating any Google policy.

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