I usually get to my LingQ account by typing in LingQ into Google, which would then bring up the LingQ homepage in the first page of results.
However, I don’t know if it’s just in the U.K, but I tried this today, using the same method, and couldn’t locate the LingQ homepage, or any other LingQ page in any of the first 10+ pages of results! I do see that Benny the ‘polyglott’ seems to have his rather unfair review of Lingq, as the number one slot and also on several other slots across all pages.
Has there been some underhand search engine optimization going on, to knock LingQ, off of Google? It seems that it would be almost impossible for a prospective student, to now stumble across LingQ via Google, because of this issue.
It’s a shame, as the LingQ site is an excellent resource.
A search for lingq.com resulted in a number of relevant hits.
For anybody who uses Google Chrome, you can always type any URL in the search field (or in a regular text area like this one I’m writing in right now), highlight it, and then choose “Open [URL]”.
I’ve found that method very useful when I don’t have the site as a bookmark, in the history, or simply don’t want to use the address bar. (Depending on browser settings, there can be a lot of auto-complete suggestions, taking up half the browser window…)
I can confirm that here as well, a search for LingQ has no results from lingq.com here on Google Australia. Strange, I was just searching for “LingQ API” a moment ago and wondering why none of the links were from LingQ.com. It’s still showing up in Bing Australia and the robots.txt file seems fine. Sure looks like a Google penalty
Any warnings in the Google Webmaster Tools account for LingQ? Sudden changes to the number of pages indexed?
I just searched for LingQ.com using DuckDuckGo. The first hit was the official LingQ site. The fifth hit was the Wikipedia article.
Here it is Thursday, Sept. 12, 2013, 5:51 PM Central Daylight Time.
same problem here, the site is great but unfortunately most people going through google to get lingq will find benny’s review of lingq which is a problem.
If it helps, I might have an idea of what’s happened (but I could be totally wrong)…
I just remembered that LingQ has a feature to import RSS feeds (which is great!)… but LingQ also creates a separate page for each of those RSS Wall Post pages, and Google might be looking at those pages as duplicate content / content scraping from other websites & giving a penalty for it. Maybe you could add a robots noindex Meta tag to those RSS Wall Post pages (and even a “nofollow” on the links to those pages), that might help things a bit? And if the noindex is just on the RSS pages, that would still allow original wall posts written on the LingQ site to be indexed in Google, if that’s what you prefer.
I could be totally wrong, so I hope I don’t make things even worse with my suggestion! But I thought I’d mention it in case it helps.
@syneryder - Thanks We’re still not sure entirely why this happened – it looks like there were some links pointing at us from a strange site. In any case, hopefully we can get to the bottom of it sooner rather than later and get Google to revert whatever it was that they did.
Just noticed that LingQ is showing up in Google searches again, hooray! Are you able to share any general tips for what you did to get the site back? (Might be useful to other webmasters to know what to do if they’re in a similar situation.)
@syneryder - Yes, we are showing up again Unfortunately there’s not much advice we can offer. They never told us any specifics of what it was that caused them to remove us, and we were pretty much in the dark. In the end we don’t really know why we were removed and what it was we did that caused them to add us back. In any case, we’re happy to be back!
We’re still not sure entirely why this happened – it looks like there were some links pointing at us from a strange site. In any case, hopefully we can get to the bottom of it sooner rather than later and get Google to revert whatever it was that they did.