My Website's Rankings Are About To Go Down For The Count

[morestar]

That's my horrifying belief this morning after just finding out that ALL and I mean ALL my blogs hosted at Wordpress.com have been suspended - and the worst part is, not really that the blogs are down but much more importantly that I may lose all my content - which was quite a bit, especially for my main signature domain - woe is me.

So of course I had to look into this and found there's a Wordpress types of blogs page that lists the good blogs and the bad blogs on Wordpress.com and I can safely say, my blogs, although quite linky, were good blogs. I've contacted them but on the terms and conditions page they state clearly that it's rare that they bring a blog back - I'm dead!

The only clause on the types of blogs page I may (I stress 'may') have breached is the following:

SEO blogs: Blogs that are written for search engines instead of humans. These blogs are dedicated to trying to fool Google and other search engines into ranking them or the sites they link to highly. wordpress.com is not meant for this type of activity.

However, NONE of my articles are written for machines or bots! None! Sure I place links in my articles, links to my sites and all sorts of other sites INCLUDING my competitors. I don't slander them either - I commend if they deserve it.

Now, if my site doesn't get reinstated I believe I will be a dead man, that my site will take a dive in the SERPs (search results pages). My whole link profile is going to be destroyed!

Has this happened to a soul here at WebProWorld.com? Has anyone's Wordpress.com blog ever been suspended? Even reinstated?

Are my rankings going to plummet??

[mjtaylor]

Are you saying you don't have a backup of your database? (I don't know much about wp hosting.) I have a small blog on blogger and I am busy getting another blog organized, as I know Google could take mine away at any moment!

[morestar]

Are you saying you don't have a backup of your database? (I don't know much about wp hosting.) I have a small blog on blogger and I am busy getting another blog organized, as I know Google could take mine away at any moment!

Oh ya MJ, I could have easily backed up my files from the site - Wordpress.com blogs do give you the option from what I remember. I do remember doing a backup a few months ago from one of my blogs but I need to dig deep to find this.

They haven't responded to my support email. I'm getting concerned...

[mjtaylor]

Which site is it?

[a53mp]

What do you mean you MAY have? You either did or didn't.

Either way, you should ALWAYS host your sites on your own server. This way you can do whatever you want and have full control over your site. It is well worth the cheap investment especially if you are running serious sites.

But yeah, if you sites and/content go down, chances are your rankings will be affected.

Good luck!

[rickvidallon]

Just a thought for this... maybe try Way Back machine if you fail to find a back up?

[Ravenhawk]

Well if you have violated their terms in anyway you probably won't even gain access to get your content back, and their terms are pretty brutal even one affiliate link from any post is enough to get tossed.I Highly recommend you move all your stuff to a proper hosting provider and install a freestanding copy of wordpress you get all the benefits without the restrictions. I have a great article on the subject here http://www.johnoverall.com/think-bef...your-business/

I do hope you get access to get your stuff but don't hold your breath.. You may have to go from your latest backup and try to continue forward..

[mgandy]

So is the whole site shutdown or they just wont let you login? If cant login you might still be able to get the text from you posts from Google. As long as the pages have been indexed you can use the site:www.yoururl.com and see all the pages you have. I know its time consuming but you can cut and paste the text onto wordpad or some program like that. If the whole site has been suspended and removed there probably isn't much you can do.

[PhilipDunn]

sorry to hear Morestar - this is certainly a good lesson - i'll now be sure not to find myself in the same situation..

[morestar]

What do you mean you MAY have? You either did or didn't.

Either way, you should ALWAYS host your sites on your own server. This way you can do whatever you want and have full control over your site. It is well worth the cheap investment especially if you are running serious sites.

But yeah, if you sites and/content go down, chances are your rankings will be affected.

Good luck!

Yes I may have and will be able to determine this once I search through my files!!

Re: self hosted. I know, I know...a few years ago I started hosting a bunch of Wordpress sites and usually mainly try to secure my trademarks ie mysite.wordpress.com - just in case someone tries to squat on my name but...at the same time I used it too, as a regular blog and wrote quite a few articles there - for many sites actually...

I sorta feel liberated actually. No offence but it's rather insulting that Wordpress.com wouldn't give me a nice headsup and say "hey, you're doing something against our terms, fix that"...If so, I could come here and post it as a warning to people and the snowball of avoiding breaking Wordpress's terms and conditions would keep rolling.

Ya I'm quite alright with it now. If they fall they fall which means I'll just have to work harder again.

One good thing was that I did get the Google cached version of all my posts (this is the main site I'm concerned about, my main signature link) and will republish them on my own domain IF I see my rankings go down...

Oh and I'll never ever use Wordpress again for personal uses because of this - I'm sure I did break the rules somewhere, somehow but to treat me in such a way as to not even notify me or give me my archive well, that's just rude - too much of a hard lined approach to the whole situation. In their support area they state that in some cases they notify the user in the dashboard if there's a terms issue - well, where's mine???

Anyways, free of Wordpress I am.