So, Google took the most wonderful collection of billboards off its index. Fair is fair: they wrote me a nice automated letter saying they had found some hidden text, which is against their publisher guide, and said they would blacklist the site for about a month. I wish they were more selective in enforcing the rule since the hidden text (blue on blue background) was one short sentence designed to help the spiders to index it better, but whatever. It's their index and I knew what I was doing.
I removed the offensive text and did the magic dance to appease the Google Gods, but it will take a bit for the things to go back to normal. In the meanwhile, I hope you don't mind if I post occasional links back to Billboardom here. If you want it in your RSS reader, the direct link is this.
For the morbidly curious, here's what the wrath sounds like:
"Dear site owner or webmaster of billboardom.blogspot.com,
While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages were using techniques that were outside our quality guidelines, which can be found here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, we have temporarily removed some webpages from our search results. Currently
pages from billboardom.blogspot.com/ are scheduled to be removed for at least 30
days."
