On New Year’s Eve, I got an email from Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s webspam team. I waited to post this (unedited) excerpt because I wanted to check in with him before doing so. Needless to say, I don’t think Matt had that night off — he emailed me pretty much right after it went up, and it was a full apology. The subject line read, “greetings and apology”:
“I read your most recent post at
http://www.tinynibbles.com/blogarchives/2006/12/google_is_still_pretty_broken.html
and wanted to try to explain a little bit about what’s been going on.
Let me start with last week though and work up to today. I’ve been
digging into what happened with tinynibbles.com. Our algorithms do
know that your site is a high-quality resource, but a chain of several
bad circumstances, including at least one bug, caused your site’s
ranking to drop (as far as I can tell) starting around Dec. 23rd. I
believe fixed data started going out the morning of the 28th, and I’m
sorry that it took that long to put things right.”
A few days later I was also contacted by a different faction at Google, letting me know that they were keeping an eye on me. And that someone there had even ordered a few of my books!
