Homeland Security Stole My Site!

I'm looking at my Adsense earnings this morning and notice they're a little low. A little meaning like 10% of my usual earnings. I wasn't too pleased. Pageviews looking low too. How low? Like 10. I'm scratching my head – am I banned from Google/Yahoo/MSN? Is the world gone to sleep? Everyone got their holidays done and booked for the Summer (the site advertises villas in Turkey)? Very foolishly I dismiss it and leave the questions open for a while until I finish breakfast.

So later on I go to the website to check out something else, completely unrelated. And nothing. PAGE NOT FOUND. Oh fff… I open up FTP to see what's happening on the server end of things. And I get… a blank folder. Blank. …Oh fffuh….. "What have I done?"

I go to my web host's site – 2MHost; after this ordeal I won't give them the honour of a direct link – and look for a phone number. None to be found. I suddenly lose all my faith in the up until now fairly reliable host. I get onto their Live Chat, wait for about 10 minutes for the guy to tell me what the hell has happened. Then get a canned response to the effect that the US Department of Homeland Security (there it is, oh fuck!) has confiscated their hard drives. 'Objectionable material'. Possibly terrorist documents? 'We don't think we will get them back in a timely manner so we have restarted all logins with blank accounts …. 3 months free hosting to compensate'. Oh thanks. Three months hosting what? I have no files.

So thanks to Al Quaida, or probably more likely some guy's child porn fetish, I'm stuck without a website for a while. I have a backup made a few weeks ago and it should be OK as nothing much has changed since. The problem is it's in Dublin, and I'm at the other side of the country right now, in Kerry. Of course it had to strike me on the extremely rare occasion that I travel down here for four days – it was for a once-off prize ceremony of all things.

The only chance that I could be online sooner than Monday would be if my roommate could email me the contents of my backup CD. But I'm not holding out hope for that – tonight's the night of the Trinity Ball and he's got a ticket. So he won't be in any state for anything for the rest of the weekend!

The Real Fear is that the search engines might de-index my site in the meantime. It gets crawled very frequently, sometimes several times a day. On the advice of some Digital Point members I frantically grabbed caches of my most popular pages off of G/Y/M and stuck them online. Fingers crossed!

The First

The first post. Always a difficult read. In fact, if you're reading this 1000 posts on in the hopefully colourful life of this blog, just skip on. To the colour.

So what will I be taking up your time with? If you pay attention you'll notice that I have more interests and occupations than hours to tease them with. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation for the uninitiated) will dominate, as it makes me the frugal sums I live on. Or rather drink on as food's not too dear. This includes my various growing online businesses. Why? Because without a a large marketing budget, SEO is the only way to get the message out to my potential clients. It works like this:

1. Build up a decent, respectable looking site with something to offer. This is by far the most important step.
2. SEO that motha till you get to top 3 in MSN, then Yahoo, then Google for the keywords you are targeting.
3. If you've done step 1 well, and step 2, then you will get visitors that find your site useful. Those visitors have friends, colleagues, clients, bosses, taxi drivers…
4. SEO becomes unnecessary as you will gain more natural links than you could ever hope to garner unnaturally.

SEO is scaffolding.

May this post not be my last, as so many of my other blogs have dragged their heels before they could walk.