About this blog

Ok, you win google

I decided to move my old blog content to google's blogger.com. Hopefully this will allow me to use Adsense, and also improve my google SEO so people will be able to discover my content more easily. Having a .tk domain made this very difficult as google treats these domains as spammer sites.

So what will I be journalling in this blog? Well, I try to code as much as I can, but I also like to 'make' things. What king of things? Check out the side panel for more info ;)

Update: A friend suggested I list the reasons Google gave. The email I received was in Finnish, so here is a translated version of the specific reasons in English.

• It is important that the Google ads on sites seem to offer significant value to users. As a publisher, you must provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site.
• Do not place ads on auto-generated pages or pages with original content is low or where the original content is not at all.
• Your site should also provide a good user experience through clear navigation and organization. Then users can move easily from page to page and find what they are looking.

What I understood from this...

In the first two points, Google are basically accusing me of ripping-off other content creators. They even mention the method I supposingly use, auto-generated pages as a possible method of doing this. For the record, I have never done this, although I have gone through various free domains in the past years, and content (hosted on the same server) could be cached on those old domains, which I have previously owned.

I have no idea what to say about the third point, but my site used WordPress and all posts were relevantly tagged. The site itself featured the various menus and sidebars to help the user navigate and find content. During my studies, I actually won a client competition for the best WordPress site design, chosen by the client who used the site for their business. So are Google saying WordPress is not a worthy product to feature in its search results?

I'm going to speculate here that the reason my site was rejected here was simply because it had a .tk domain name. I also had problems getting my site to appear at all within search results, usually by copy and pasting either the post's title or a chunk of relevant unique text into the search input. I basically had to put the sentence or title "in quotes" so it retuned only exact matches. Come to your own conclusions -- I already have.