SEO Fail

So. I've been working quite hard at getting course material together... mainly for OO Software Analysis Design courses and a Design Patterns course. The motivation comes from years and years of teaching Other Peoples Courses and experience a deep and abiding dissatisfaction with the material I am handed to work with. I strongly suspect that my students sense this...

Not Good!

So - after a very, very long time umming and aahing over it - I've put my own course materials together. Blatantly stealing tricks and tips from the HeadFirst books, plans include incorporating video and even music. Dare I say I've done a whole lot better than the usual run-of-the-mill courseware? Order of magnitude? But that would be presumptuous, wouldn't it?

Along the way I realised that I needed to pay a whole lot of attention to my (business) website. The old one sucked. Bad! Not at all descriptive of what I'm now doing or trying to achieve in the OO design and architecture space. So I spent a little time reading up on the website of that famous search engine about how best to structure my site and its content for searching. How to better market what it is I do. I read all about "not using Black Hat SEO" techniques. I paid strict attention to their advice! And I went forth and restructured... but only in a good way! What you see is what the googlebot gets. No tricks!

The result?

Falling from a page-rank of nearly fuck all, I now have a page rank of... zero. Thanks, Google! I guess I'll take my advertising business over to Microsoft, now.

I can only speculate what might have brought this on. Perhaps I got listed on some directory site that Google's software considers Bad News. That's the most likely thing I can think of... Or did I just use words like "software design and architecture" a time or two too many? Perhaps it was the word "Java"...

Unfortunately - like The Borg - there's no Human Person one can contact at Google to say, "Hey! I'm really a Person. What went wrong here and how do I fix it?" Pretty much I'm screwed. Where my site was ranking very well for searches on stuff like "software design training", "Java training"  and "software architecture course" last week, this week I'm nowhere to be seen. Instead you'll see listing from schmucks offering the same-old same-old. The same tired, half-hearted training crap that led me to start developing my own course material in the first place!

So what's a Real Human to do? I guess I'll just have to live with it. After all, my reputation amongst intelligent human beings is top-notch... not something I have to worry about. So do I need to get upset over how some software see me?

Probably not.