I always thought that Google hated 3arn.Net (Despite the fact that it sends me a lot of targeted traffic, lol) until yesterday. I can’t be happier than this. What I had been waiting for since I started this blog.

Juicy Sitelinks!

For me, this is the distinction between an average and an above the average website. Although the notice on google’s webmaster tools about sitelinks says:

Sitelinks are links to a site’s interior pages. Not all sites have sitelinks. Google generates these links automatically, but you can remove sitelinks you don’t want.

Though the only bad thing about Google’s sitelinks is that Google selects them by itself and you basically get no choice to select which ones you want. However, in my case, I have got the best pages on my website on sitelinks.

They only give you the choice of blocking a sitelink that you do not want to show on the google search engine result page, which I would definitely not want or maybe in the future.  Below is a screen shot from this page:

Well one thing that I’ve noticed is that sitelinks change quite often. When my website first started showing sitelinks, it was showing 6 of them. I decided not to block even one of the them because they certainly gave my website clear dominance on the search engine results page.

However, here I am checking after almost a week and now it has left my website with only 3 sitelinks. This is also a very common thing that I’ve seen in websites. In fact, it is very smart to have found two of my best articles on the website. Although I’m not so pleased with the Advertise page on there but I guess it is going to work out just fine.

Here is a screen shot of this page showing this blog with the sitelinks:

It might as well be that by the time that you check this link, the sitelinks of my website would have already changed because I saw a change in them after four days and since it was last updated on 8th November, it might be updated next on 12th November.

How To Get Sitelinks?

I know you might be thinking this for a while and while I’m not an expert on this topic and neither do I know that my advice will work for you or not. To me, the sitelinks have proven to be the links that:

• Are given the most importance throughout the site
• Have the most internal links
• Have the most links to them

These might be the measures that Google’s “Automatic” bot assigns sitelinks to a website for. While this is still a guess, I’m pretty sure that one of those three factors has do play a crucial role for the assignment of sitelinks to a website. In fact, if you know of any other thing that matters or have something to say about sitelinks in general then please do so in the comments below.

I’ll start off with the facts about Google and their policy for no forgiveness on suspension of Google accounts whatsoever. Please note that the values given below are taken from the account suspension issue since January 2009.

• More than 100 Google accounts are disabled every month for no reason.
• Less than 1% of them are lucky enough to get their accounts enabled again.
• The longest duration of suspension of a Google account that I found was 4 years. Which means: It’s been 4 years since the account was disabled, and Google still doesn’t forgive.
• In my encounter only 1 out of 200 people was satisfied with Google’s official support for Google accounts and their suspension.
• Surprisingly, around 20% of the blogs that had their accounts disabled were about Google or one of it’s product and their hacks, news, etc.
• None of the people who had their accounts’ suspended received a notification from Google.

Now that I built the grounds for the talk let’s get on with the topic. If you’re a regular reader here then you must be familiar with my bad experience with Google in the past. There weren’t many, but one that was devastating enough for me when blogger disabled my account and of course blogger is a part of Google.

What I haven’t shared earlier was that the first Adsense account that I used was shared by me and my friend. We started off with it in 2007 and like a typical greedy teenager my friend clicked his ads a few times.

We got hit on the head with a stone that read, “Your account is disabled”. While  I was taking in charge I thought that it might be a small suspension and I would be re-accepted back. But as I speak of today, it has been 28 weeks since we got suspended from Adsense. We tried re-applying more than 50 times, but no luck.

Turned out that I wasn’t the only one who was bashed by Google on Adsense and Blogger. I mean I would do the same thing if I was in their shoes, but if a guy comes after 2 years and asks for re-instating his account then he might be serious.

What enforced me to write this article was that I recently happened to have a look at the stats for my article about blogger disabling my account and saw that it was gaining increasing visitors from search engines although it has been on top for those keywords for almost 6 months now.

Then, I happened to check on the blogger.com’s official forum and several other webmaster forums and I was surprised to find that there were more than 150 bloggers claiming that their accounts had been disabled for no reason. I had a good laugh when I read this reply by some person:

Ouch! I can see the red rash on your face from the hard slap from blogger. Don’t lose hope and create a new blog elsewhere or on blogger again if you still have a slice of trust for blogger and google. No need to rant about the disabled account. I’ve been roaming on the forums and Google’s contact forms like a wandering dog for a year and a half now to get my 15 blogs back and the dog’s brain tells me that it is as hopeless as a twilight obsessed girl. So please move on…

Another person wrote:

Don’t waste your time expecting a Google worker to come through this. They won’t help you - they don’t help anyone.

Those folks sure don’t sound too happy with Blogger’s support with their responses.

Since I’ve been getting quite a lot of people coming from search phrases like “Blogger Disabled Account”, I was fortunate enough to have a word with a few of those who left comments.

Around 60% switched to Wordpress while the rest just quit blogging! I’ll tell you the most funny part of the whole story, I know spammers inside out. If Google deletes a Gmail account for spam, the spammer will create a new one.

If Google deletes one of their Adsense accounts for click fraud, they’ll have 10 other accounts running in no time. They’re professionals and in my opinion Google tries to take the frustration off by disabling the accounts of innocent users.

The bottom line is, Google thinks that it is acting very smart with it’s account suspension policy but I suppose they would also not know the shocking facts that I listed out here. In case they did, it’s not very nice of them to overlook that.