Ok, we’re back and, as before, it was a month (to the day) that we were out of Google … so this time I think I know why. When we get new links to tickets we tweet the fact so that our followers can track new availability …

When we started we just did summary quotes a couple of times a day but we were contacted by users and told that that was less than helpful .. after all, we don’t know what our users might be looking for … so we started tweeting all new ticket blocks, well, actually, all shows that got new ticket blocks, so if a show gets new tickets from 5 suppliers in one day that was one tweet not five …

Trouble is, we can easily have a couple of hundred of these a day and to Google this looks likle a couple of hundred new links to our site a day which it interprets as spam linking!

So, dilemma, do we try to tweet every show and risk falling foul of the Google tripwire or do we throttle our twitter activity? No contest really, useful as twitter is it does NOT represent a huge amount of our traffic, Google does so we do what Google will accept rather than what our users have asked for. Not our fault guys and gals, pure self preservation!

Having said that, we returned from our enforced absence with page rank and traffic restored immediately to pre-ban levels and, actually, growing!