My Advise: Don’t Do It

By Vlad Zablotskyy November 20, 2007 Bookmark and Share

Experimenting with Googlebot is indeed interesting. However my advise to anyone contemplating to restrict Googleot from your site via robots.txt is simple: DON’T DO IT! Besides the fact that in a short term you will loose some search traffic(no matter how little that traffic is) you may suffer some long term consequences.

Google commands authority whether we like it or not. Once your website is gone from Google index it may be interpreted that your website is not safe to be visited, what is worst many web masters may think that your website is not safe to link to. Mark’s article about his websites being hacked may not be a good example, I believe his websites were not removed from index. But let say your website is 2-3 years old and is not in Google’s index, other webmasters will look at it suspiciously and I do not blame them.

I was lucky enough to generate links from some very influential bloggers even after my website was gone from Google’s index- you may not be so lucky.

Am I letting the Googlebot back? Not yet. My experiment is not over. However, besides learning a few things my experiment is accomplishing nothing. I think engaging in a constructive criticism will bring much better results!

categories Other (Fom Old Blog)

  • Disappointed to hear you took this step. Looking at your linked posts you're admitting that Google won.

    Linkbait?
  • Well it did become a good link bait. But I think I lost my focus:

    http://collective-thoughts.com/2007/11/20/socia...

    There are more important things in life to worry about.
  • I agree that there's no point to banning Google.

    I may still tell people that's the reason why a couple of my sites have zeroed out, however. ;) And if at any point a lot of us got together and did it en masse, well, that could be interesting indeed. But I don't see that happening in the foreseeable future.

    What I've learned from all this is that I need to accrue some stats for my sites that DON'T rely on pagerank. Create an "advertise here" page on each site with links to stats from a third party observer that doesn't even mention PR, and give potential advertisers a real sense of what my site's reach is.

    I need to be more proactive, and in a way, Google's silliness has pushed me to to get proactive, and that's a good thing. :)
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