It has been only 12 hours since I have instructed Googlebot to ignore my website, while at the same time removing my website from Google index. And I am extremely impressed by the quickness and effectiveness Google responded to my commands/requests. There is hardly any evidence of my website in the Google index if you search “site:www.volodymyrzablotskyy.com“. The best part of it all is that I ma here bragging about it! Few months ago such an event as getting kicked out of the Google index would send me into a panic, today it feels liberating.
Interesting thing is that blocking Googlebot via robots.txt will not exclude your blog from Google Blog Search. Although this entire experiment is meant to test how a blog would survive without Google, I am not concerned with Google Blog Search since it never sent my way any traffic in the past.
It is too son to evaluate the predictions I have made in my previous post. It is too soon to judge about loss of traffic in fact today have experience a 500% increase of traffic thanks to StumbleUpon, Sphinn, BumpZee and other social websites. The last SK2 notification indicated that there were 42 spam comments attempted in the last 8 hours. I do believe that much of the automated spam will decrease. I think I may also have been mistaken about other bloggers willingness to link to my blog, it remains to be seen if incoming links will continue to come in when the bloggers will not be able to find my blog in the index. Andy has mentioned that he considers me a founder and will not remove my blog from DoFollow community, since I am not blocking Yahoo and MSN bots. To be honest I never understood if Yahoo and MSN paid any attention to “nofollow” tag.
In conclusion I have to say that my first 12 hours without Google are quiet successful. But I still would discourage to follow my example, because it is as much foolish as it is daring.
The unfortunate side of this experiment is that I failed to write about my my trip to North Carolina and meeting with John Nardollili, my account rep from Link Connector. Meeting with John was one of the highlights of my trip and I will write about it soon. Meanwhile make sure to check out Link Connector. They have some very cool merchants in their network. Many of their merchants offer free access to product data feeds.