Craigslist Ad hurt my site on Google

I can’t explain this but I suspect that running a Craigslist ad might have hurt my website.

I was looking for someone to paint my house. And so I posted an ad with a link to a couple of photos. I put the photos on my website because that seemed like the easiest way to get a link to them. I use WordPress so it was just a matter of “adding” the photos to the Media Library of my website. Once I did that, I was able to get a url to the two photos.

This is seemed like a good idea and I found a good painter for my house. There was a huge spike in traffic because of the clicks on the two photos of my house. But right after the ad started running I noticed a drop off in traffic. And the only explanation I can think of is that Google was somehow punishing me for running an ad on Craigslist.

So, I have removed the photos and I am writing this story in the hopes that I can help someone also avoid this problem. If you want to create a link to photos for a Craigslist ad, I suggest that you use a service like Photobucket. Otherwise, So, I have removed the photos and I am writing this story in the hopes that I can help someone also avoid this problem. If you want to create a link to photos for a Craigslist ad, I suggest that you use a service like Photobucket. Otherwise, Google might get the wrong impression and they might punish your site by ignoring your new content.

I have contact Google by going to this page. I wrote them a brief email and sent them a link to this article. I am hopeful that they will unblock the indexing of my new content because at this point I am not very motivated to create new articles if Google is going to just ignore my work.

Resolution:

I originally posted this on May 24, 2010. I finally have this fixed on August 15th, 2010. Most of that time was wasted because I did not know how to fix it.

I wrote emails to Google Apps people but they told me that I was working with the wrong department. I was eventually steered towards the Google Alerts page. If you are not using Google Alerts, sign up and see if your site is being indexed as you are adding new pages and they are not showing up as an email alert, contact Google.

Click here and report the problem.