Google mystery solved
Anybody remember the post on Slashdot about Google Sitemaps? The deal was you run this python script and it’ll help the Google spider crawl your site.
So I went through the whole drawn out process, added my site to their service, and completely forgot about it. I never bothered to update the script and after checking my webserver, didn’t even have it anymore!
I had a feeling that this was why my site stopped appearing on Google, but I had forgotten the name of the service and couldn’t find it anywhere on Google’s site. So last night I searched around for a while on Slashdot, found the article, and promptly deleted the link to my site on Sitemaps.
Sure enough, after checking this afternoon, this site appears again on Google when you search for my name. My advice to you is not to use Sitemaps unless you stay on top of it, who knows how much search engine traffic I’ve lost.
And to top it all off, I just noticed that this site even has a PageRank of 4, which I’m kinda tickled about.