Google has de-listed SermonIndex (almost all pages) Ways you can help

Saints,

It seems as if Google has de-listed the sermonindex site so when you search for "sermonindex" you do not get SermonIndex.net We have gone ahead and asked google to verify why this has happened etc. Please firstly pray that the Lord allows this for the good and it gets listed again soon. Yes praying does matter and God will at times not work unless the people of God pray.

Secondly a very positive way you can help is link to www.sermonIndex.net from your blog, or website. By putting a few links on your blog or website will give the site extra POSITIVE credit which will make it seem more valid to be listed.

Thank you saints for your help.

The gates of hell shall not prevail against you, brother.
This site is built on the Rock of Christ! Hallelu Yah.
Will pray gladly for favor from Google.

We received a message from a brother:

Steven Ray Ummm... I provide SEO services and collected 715,000 direct results from searching for SermonIndex using the query operator: site:sermonIndex.net I don't see any indicators of being blacklisted on Google. Bing on the other hand, only provided 59,200 results.

and my reply:

Greg Gordon Yes but I think every listing is demoted SERVERLY such as just searching for "sermonindex" you do not find the actual site homepage even on the first 2 pages where before it was listed number 1, etc. Brother steve if you had any time and desire to help serve and help that would be great.

--

So it seems the site has not been totally de-listed just servely demoted for some reason. May God again open doors with Google to show favour, this shows saints how if they wanted to minimize a site for a specific search phrase such as "home churches" "persecution" etc they could very easily.

In my mind there is not logical reason for them to take down sermonindex so quickly from their rankings.

Thank you for your continued prayers. Over 50% of the traffic is directly from google search results.

I just searched Leonard Ravenhill and the first link for sermonindex.net was on the 5 page. it didn't use to be that far down... odd

The problem is that those accessing the site from Search Engines over 90% of those results are from Google. In the end this could show how it is not healthy or right to have one search engine being so pre-dominate.

Let's pray this is cleared up soon.

Is there anything going on with google as far as starting to charge buisnesses for there listings??

That definitely could be a route things are going. I was thinking about this much tonight that I use gmail (a google service), I search with google.com (exclusively), In the past I was even using Chrome (the google browser), I use google maps for all my location searches. To me there is perhaps too much of a monopoly for something everyone uses everyday.

I remember many years ago altavista was a great search directory and also goshen was a wonderful Christian search engine.

If you need someone to speak with them locally, let me know. I am located about two miles from their campus.

I got the mental picture of a david before a goliath. Thank you for your continued prayers.

I already did! www.godweb.info and I gave it over to a brother to continue to build and run. To make one that is very accurate and large would take alot of money and time. I did it in 1 month with barely any start up cost.

I own a restaurant and google is really stepping up the telamarketers on us. I do believe they are working on charging to their listings.

Very interesting.

Brother,

Yes now it is showing some of the query searches but still if searching for anything like: Leonard Ravenhill, A.W. Tozer, or any other name on the site it is not showing on the front page where it was easily before.

Also when searching for "sermonindex" it showed the site as a featured listing it does not do this anymore.

We recently had those spam attacks on the site where many spam links were posted, I cleaned them up right afterwards but maybe that has penalized the site is one of my thoughts.

Thank you for your continued prayers and if you have a website or blog do consider linking to www.sermonindex.net to help promote the site for better rankings on google.

Dear Brother,

Thank you for these suggestions, I have really worked and done much with the first suggestions but the later ones I will look more closely into.

6. Use internal links (think that works already).
7. Use a sitemap and give it to google (through google webmaster tools).
8. Use microdata where you can.
9. Not to much links.
10. Very important: use permalinks/canonical-links and make sure you use 'pretty urls' like: /preachers/leonard-ravenhill/sermon-why-revival-tarries
11. Give a description on every page (visible for the people) which use the same words as in the keywords.

Please give me an email at: sermonindex@gmail.com I would like to ask you more questions brother if you had time.

My dear Greg,
not the case for this laptop, i immediately put in 'sermonindex' into google, and everything is at the top....number one return.

fret not.

I too googled sermonindex, and it began here.......which I clicked.....and the next 35 pages........and many more waiting to be turned.[ maybe hundreds.]

I suspect that either you were temporarily hacked by a Google employee.......or one of the vast number of trolls that hate this site......and that Google reinstated this anomaly as they turned their encryption over for the day, or for them, probably every hour.

You have more direct references than any Christian site I have ever seen on Google....

You are highly and accurately publicized on the Google ranch, and the Word is getting out around the World....Even Eritrea!

You have more direct references than any Christian site I have ever seen on Google....

You are highly and accurately publicized on the Google ranch, and the Word is getting out around the World....Even Eritrea!

Brother, that is the issue the site has alot of links towards it. One problem could be wrong links from bad sites that why I encouraged those have have a christian website or blog to link to sermonindex a few times on it.

It seems searches for "sermonindex" work now and its back to the top with the featured status.

But any other searches for other content such as: aw tozer sermons
the ranking is on the 2nd page instead of the top 2-3 hits on the front page. So there has been a severe demoting of the site.

Third, I saw site response time given as a factor. I have been wondering why the site is many times slower over the past few months. It used to load very speedily, but now a page takes five or more seconds to load, a pretty long wait.

Though we have been working to ensure the site loads fast this should not be an issue to majorly demote a website in search rankings it is just 1 of 100 things they look for to rank a site.

Google shows you search results based on searches you do and web pages you visit.

Agreed and that is on the problems to me that does not sit easy with me if someone wants to visit christian sites google could decide for any reason to not let them because maybe google wants to balance out their diet of these sites etc. This could easily be used for the wrong.

And the results that are happening now I have verified really are not to do with specific tailored results for individuals but all are having the links demoted.

Thank you for your continued prayers saints.

When I search for SermonIndex on Google from the UK I get 704,000 search listings in .5 second.

Still the ability of the SI site to load is definitely challenged. Either this has something to do with commercial bandwidth restrictions on CloudFlare's dynamic bandwidth protocol implementation or else their is a DNS configuration issue possibility the DNS zone table needs re-installing, your problem may be with the DNS reverse lookup. Or you are being ping attacked from a chinese gateway.

Your server reporting facilities will tell you if the latter one is true. Or if you have access to the DNS TAG you could check the dns zone table other wise ask the Hosting server warehouse if they are restricting bandwidth for technical reasons. The delays in loading the root of the sire will have nothing to do with Google listings in any event as the information to load the requested page is directed through the ARPA DNS Root and not a search engine.

Brother,

Thanks for your thoughts, yes they still have alot of pages indexed but sadly they have lowered the page rank status it seems for the site very low. I am still trying to determine why this happened. So instead of page results being on the 1st page they are on the 2,3 or 4th etc.

I am trying to also determine the reasons for some pages loading slowly and I have narrowed down some possible problems to remedy. We were having close to 10,000 unique visitors a day on the site for a period of time and this has shown the lack of the site to be able to handle the load. So perhaps this is a grace period from the Lord to give me time to fix the site to handle the extra visitors.

I will look into your other thoughts brother, thank you!

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Also for everyone:

Please firstly pray that the Lord allows this for the good and it gets listed again soon. Yes praying does matter and God will at times not work unless the people of God pray.

Secondly a very positive way you can help is link to www.sermonIndex.net from your blog, or website. By putting a few links on your blog or website will give the site extra POSITIVE credit which will make it seem more valid to be listed.

Thank you saints for your help.

GREG: Please post a way to donate xtra cash to help you expand, or reincrypt, or whatever you need to do so to get ur done.

[ I know it is there...but I'm slow...so please re-post for me...]

I want to commit $25. to help....and perhaps others too would feel led to do so...

Tom.

Double Post

GREG: Please post a way to donate xtra cash to help you expand, or reincrypt, or whatever you need to do so to get ur done.

[ I know it is there...but I'm slow...so please re-post for me...]

I want to commit $25. to help....and perhaps others too would feel led to do so...

Tom.

I wonder if this might not be the time for all of us who value this forum to consider making a financial commitment to the upkeep and maintenance of SI. Greg has borne this burden for many years and no doubt with the help of others as well. Although sometimes I feel that I don't fully understand the direction of the site discussion forum the sermons and articles are precious indeed. As the years roll on there are less and less truly sound presentations of the Gospel and this site will therefore become an eternal weight of importance in the end. We just have to remember how it was for ourselves when we first believed. Every good word was like pure milk for the soul. We sought it out and were often disappointed but when we found it we were filled and gave God the praise. I pray that the Lord moves more brethren at this time to support this ministry.

I just put in the google search "Sermon Index" and it was the first one that came up.

Am I missing something?

GREG: Please post a way to donate xtra cash to help you expand, or reincrypt, or whatever you need to do so to get ur done.

[ I know it is there...but I'm slow...so please re-post for me...]

I want to commit $25. to help....and perhaps others too would feel led to do so...

Tom.

Brothers, Thank you for your kind words, if God does lead you then you send send support to: https://www.sermonindex.net/donate.php There are alot of steps I want to take to get done so that this could be cleared up and not only that but through this I have seen alot of large extra steps I need to take to really make the site better overall.

I just put in the google search "Sermon Index" and it was the first one that came up.

I changed alot of things recently and got google to display that again but still alot of the pages are not ranking properly. Thank you for your continued prayers and yes I do believe the more sites link to specific pages it will give that page more pre-deominance or help it to be re-indexed more often.

For example if you link with the text on your site: A.W. Tozer Sermons >> to the url where aw tozer sermons that helps that phrase rank better I am sure.

I found another possible reason sermonindex.info had malware a brother in Namnibia runs that along with his network of sites including bibletube.tv please pray for him: Brother Lllewyan that he will be able to fix this immediately and well.

Thank you for your continued prayers for this ministry and site.