Not trying to stir shit here, I don’t have any specific reason to doubt Xeni’s timing assertions, she’s just not very high on my list of trusted sources right now.

The broader point you mention here is probably more relevant to all of us than the single topic of Boing Boing removing articles.

It is indeed a very good idea not to depend much on Google or BoingBoing.

Here’s a thought. As I mentioned at the bottom of the post, the biggest lesson we learned from our Google mishap was that we couldn’t be so dependent on Google to make sure people could find us and buy our films. One of the biggest things we did to change that was to go to a trade show last year (no, not AVN.)

Top to bottom it cost us about $10K to go to the show, and I’m not to proud to say there was more than a little fingernail nibbling about spending that much money. But once we got there it was clear we made the right decision.

In three days we put ourselves in front of about 2,000 buyer and there was a lot of interest in our films. We came home with nearly enough orders to cover the cost of the show, and since then we’ve more than turned a nice profit on the initial investment.

The lesson for me — a fellow who’s exploited the digital era, from digital post, to digital acquisition, to digital marketing and PR — is that the internet is a big world, but it’s not the whole world, not nearly.

Boing Boing and Google might be a big fish, they’re still a big fish in a small pond; and it’s a pond that small enough that personality or mere technical mistakes make outsized ripples. For us, long term survival means being ready for those ripples, but more importantly, being willing to sail in other waters.

I didn’t say I saw sudden shift in the days since the story broke. In light of this BB revelation I think I see an explanation for shifts that have puzzled me for a while. We are a small player, so inbounds like The Dish or BB (seem to) have an effect on ranking out of scale with the size of the mention. But with the Googlebot, who can know for sure. LIke I said, nothing earth-shattering, but the time line roughly fits, and it’s certainly not helpful.

More annoying that the loss of the link is the loss of the time and energy that went into cultivating the contact. This is the meat and potatoes of PR work, and it takes place within the context of certain understandings about relationship between journalist and sources, and the (sometimes) subtle difference between actually newsworthy information and hype. Granted Xeni/BB operate on a new frontier of these boundaries, but this episode casts Xeni/BB in a new light, at least for me. We’ll take our tid bits somewhere else.

SEO superstition strikes! The Boing Boing posts were “unpublished” many months ago, not recently. So it’s highly unlikely the effect on your rankings would have just shown up this week.

Though I’ll grant the “unpublishing” certainly doesn’t help.