The Googlebot came by my blog on Friday to spider it. I’m not sure the exact time it showed up but according to Google Webmaster Tools, 193 URLs didn’t get indexed because of a “Network unreachable” error. That normally means my blog was down when the spider came. Looking at my logs, I concluded that the Googlebot must have came around the time when the crazy Comment Relish plugin did the MySQL DOS attack on me and took the blog down for almost two hours.
The next day, I find my ranking had gone down for many of the keywords I ranked for, including make money online. With 193 unreachable URLs, I’m not surprised that search traffic is down. This should be an easy fix. Now that the site is running at full speed again, all I need to do is invite the Googlebot to come back and try again. That should restore everything.
I want to thank everyone for sending me an “OMG! You’re not #1 anymore!” email. This kind of situation always highlight the saying, “Live by the Google, die by the Google.” For many websites, their only source of Internet traffic is Google. Without it, their traffic is nothing. That is a very scary situation to be in because if Google wants to, they can remove you from their index at the snap of a finger and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Yes, you should work on getting Google traffic, but you shouldn’t do it the exclusion of everything else. If the bulk of your traffic comes from Google, then you need to work on getting other traffic sources. Just as I advise that Google AdSense shouldn’t be your sole online income source, Google search shouldn’t be your sole traffic source.