Regrouping (if one person can regroup)

I have yet to fully recover from the 54 day ban from Google (7/28 - 9/22) even though I have made some significant improvements to the site. Prior to the ban I was filled with enthusiasm about an almost unbroken three-year run of escalating traffic and income. During the ban, and even now to some extent I am disheartened. I am not now as despairing now as I had been during the ban but I have come realize that while Google may not be evil at its core, it is not very good either.

This is a post about my progress since the ban, but I do want to take one swipe at G. When there is a consistency over a period of years, and it is known, or should be known, that people are depending upon this consistency, there is a responsibility to at least acknowledge an act that can potentially destroy lives. I find Google in this regard to be reckless, heartless and irresponsible. I still don't know why my site was banned, I don't know why it was unbanned, I don't know whether the changes I made during the ban helped or hurt.

I have now completed my first purge of dead links from the big link table since July, and during this coming week will be updating the pages on the site that are fed by this table. This is a good time to think about a dynamic database which automatically updates the site. I'm not ready for that yet and am thinking that it may be better to shrink the site than to take that next step. But since the old pages still produce income I won't remove them. I will simply post a notice on them that they are not being updated as often as the Fashion directory...

There is still a lot that remains to be done, I think I have the spirit remaining to do it.