Searching for the real nathan wallace

A few days ago, my personal home page and blog suddenly lost all of their Google juice. After being the number one result on “nathan wallace” for many years all of a sudden I’m not even in the top 200 results.

The weird thing is that the top 10 results are still pretty much all to do with me, they are just specific articles I wrote, people pointing to my blog or profile pages about me on other websites.

The dropped pages are still in Google’s index and can be found through very specific searches.

The only explanations I can come up with are:

1. I’m using 301 permanent redirects from the old URLs like http://www.e-gineer.com/nathan/index.phtml to http://www.e-gineer.com/nathan/. This is part of changing my site to purely static content.
2. This blog is published to the e-gineer site using FTP from Blogger. You can tell since the pages contain metadata saying it is blogger generated. Perhaps the splog problem is being targetted even harder by Google.
3. I’ve actively started updating the e-gineer site and the pigeons really don’t like the direction my content is taking…

I love Google and rely on their services for email, blogging and my daily searching. No complaints here. But, I am searching for reasons as to why I’m suddenly being cast off into the index wilderness. Google, why don’t you like me anymore?

Update (Oct 14, 2005): My blog has jumped back up to result #3.

Update (Oct 15, 2005): My blog is now #2 and the Nathan page #3.

Update (Dec 3, 2005): I was lost, but now I’m found. Google, Yahoo and MSN all have the Nathan page #1 and my blog #2.

Update (Jan 2, 2006): Google has completely shunned me again.

Update (Feb 4, 2006): I’m back at #1 & #2 again.