How a Free Blogger Template De-Indexed My Site

Back in February I started a motoring blog. It began as a bit of fun, we all love cars here at Silkstream, but I also hoped to use the blog as a unique way of building contacts and furthering relationships in the motoring industry to use as leverage for several of our clients.

Most of February through to September was spent writing articles, marketing the blog and signing up a decent list of regular contributors to help with keep the content flowing consistently. I was using a free blogger template from a trusted source, and even wrote an article showing a little hack I’d learnt allowing you to add multiple authors with their own author bio.

During October I started searching for a new look to the site. The previous template had served me well as a starter, but the site was growing faster than I’d anticipated and I just wanted a cleaner “Wordpress” feel to it, without the hassle of moving over to a different blogging platform. That was when I discovered a blogger template, available to download from a free blogger theme website.

It was everything I’d been looking for, so without hesitation I duly installed it on my Blogger blog and went about making a few adjustments to the HTML to personalise the template. During this process I noticed large chunks of weird looking code, which Tristan informed me was some kind of obfuscated javascript, obviously written to “hide something”.

There’s a new fad emerging from the blog template world, create a great template or theme, remove part of the functionality and tout it as a free template. To unlock everything and get access to the full code, you need to pay the developer. Sounds like a fair deal, right? The problem is that you don’t know exactly what that obfuscated javascript is really doing behind the scenes, I learnt that the hard way. The template was only released on 15th October and by 1st November my search impressions had flatlined.

As you can imagine, I pulled the whole site apart looking for possible problems that could have caused this. I spent hours going over the code (the part that wasn’t encoded anyway) looking for an obvious error. I checked for a manual penalty warning in WMT, but there wasn’t anything. I cleaned up some of the links anyway, all of those “guest posts” filled with keyword rich anchor text probably weren’t helping matters. I also uninstalled the Google commenting system as that was another modification I had made to the site at the same time as the new template. After all this work, as far as I could tell the site was spotlessly clean and errors were little to none. So why was Google choosing to ignore all the wonderful content I had written and curated over the past year?

This wasn’t the only strange thing happening, a handy little tool I was using to measure and predict the growth of the blog stopped working. Until then I hadn’t experienced any issues with using this tool, however after adding the template, it began throwing error messages at me stating that words like “poker”, “viagra” and “casino” (all highly spammed search terms) were present on site homepage. Even though they weren’t. I checked the cached version of my blog and it redirected me to the developing sites homepage.

After everyone at Silkstream had concluded that it must be the template causing the issue, I unwillingly removed all of the code from the Blogger template, reset the blog back to a simple Blogger template, crossed my fingers and sat back and waited. Sure enough, within 1-2 weeks my blog started picking up again. Although search impression recovered rather quickly, it took a little longer for the traffic to improve back to a similar state as before the site was de-indexed.

I have to admit that I’m still not entirely sure what went wrong. In the interest of fairness I posed the question within the comments on the developers website, but was only told:

“Don’t remove footer credits!” which I obviously hadn’t.

EDIT: Since first writing this article last year, I was asked by the theme designers (not politely) to remove any mention of them. This blog post was ranking for their branded search and damaging their business. It later transpired that there was a problem with their code (although I was not offered any details as to what the problem was) and all templates were updated in Feb of this year.