There is No Conspiracy…

Ever so gradually, but undeniably, my blog has been disappearing from the net.

It all started on Super Bowl Sunday, when I noticed that the number of visits to my blog were lower than usual. I shrugged it off, figuring that everyone was watching the game. But the next day was no better – in fact, it was worse. And every day after that, fewer and fewer visitors. Posts that usually netted a hundred or more hits a day from Google searches became lost altogether, gathering dust on Blogger’s server somewhere.

Then finally, the day came when I had not a single visit from a search. Just the usual suspects coming to visit directly. (You know who you are, and I love you each and every one…)

Suspicious, I googled my blog. Nothing. I tried unique combinations of words from my busier pages. Nada. I could occasionally get a link to other blogs that linked to me, but no direct links. And no cached pages.

There was no question about it. Someone, or something was locking me out of the net.

But why? What had I done? Was Merck really that powerful? Does someone at Google or Yahoo hate me? Was it a conspiracy? Were my credit cards and bank cards suddenly going to become unusable? Was I going to disappear altogether without a trace? …

I shook off my suspicions and began to search the net for an answer. It took me a whole week, but curiosity finally won out over paranoia. And thanks in no small part to the Blogger help group and geeks such as Dave Davies and Ron Southern and Kevin Gibbons, I discovered the answer.

The Blogger Metatag Glitche

There was no conspiracy. And it was not Google’s fault. It was Blogger. It seems that my switch over to the new Blogger had caused this meta tag to be inserted into my blog’s template: $BlogMetaData$

A meta tag is a name for a list of commands, all pre-packaged by Blogger to do all sorts of nice things like name your blog and tag you blog, etc. But, hidden within the source code of my meta tag was this line: metaname=”ROBOTS”content=”NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW”

Now this command is a good way to hide your blog from the public, or disappear an embarrassing post before too many people read it. But if, like me, you want folks to find your blog and read it, it’s not a good thing. Sort of like saying to Yahoo and Google: “You can look but don’t tell anyone what you saw”.

Thanks to help from some other bloggers, I learned how to remove the offending code from my template. (It’s not too complicated, email me if you want to know, or check the sites referenced above)

Now I just have to be patient while Google’s robots crawl over my blog (I keep envisioning those spider robots from Minority Report…). And hopefully, one day soon, my blog will begin to make it’s way back from oblivion.

Apologies

For those of you who came here for food or medicine, I apologize for the techno-babble. I wrote this post so that it might help some other blogger out there who is having the same problem I did. My little pay it forward, so to speak.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got more work to do. I need to figure out how to remove the GPS device that the CIA has implanted in my scalp….