Yesterday I asked whether I had angered the Google powers, as suddenly CQ had disappeared from the results of their searches. Rob from Say Anything told me that he and I had made the same mistake: selling ad space and subdomains to a company that creates "link farms" that leverages Google searches for sales opportunities. Neither Rob nor I did enough investigation to understand the implications of the business plan. Although the folks at Business Barn treated me well and never lied to me, had I known that their business practices would get CQ banned from Google, I would have declined.

I received an e-mail from Business Barn ending our current relationship -- perhaps because my Google ranking disappeared overnight -- but offering me a new deal with free hosting and unlimited bandwidth. I have turned it down and deleted the subdomains that caused the problems with the Google search engine. I also replied to the comment that Google left on my original post explaining what happened -- and they were kind enough to send this response:

Thanks for letting us know; I'd expect captainsquartersblog.com to come fully back into the index within 1-2 days.

So just to make sure everyone knows, Google didn't delete CQ from their search engines for political reasons, and they've actually been very good about letting me know what the problem was and responsive to my solution. I'll be looking forward to visitors from Google searches later this week ...

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