Tell HN: Google Webmaster Tools is designed to help Google, not you.

I love HN because it's a place where entrepreneurs help entrepreneurs. I hope this 'Tell HN' post is useful for those who have lost organic search rankings in Google's index. A couple of my sites have always ranked on page #1 for fairly competitive keywords. A couple of months ago I noticed that one of my sites was not achieving high rankings anymore and from what I could tell the site was not being formally penalized by Google. I've never participated in any black hat tactics so I was stumped as to why one of my sites that has always ranked well, lost ranking. Like most, my sites are registered w/ Google Webmaster Tools so I can track performance and issues. To figure out what was going on, I spent days inside Google Webmaster Tools and came up empty. Not sure what to do, I started to build a new site. Then it hit me, Google Webmaster Tools is not designed to help webmasters, it is designed to help Google. If you think about it, by using Google Webmaster Tools, webmasters are telling Google what their bot/algorithm can't figure out by itself. Google needs webmasters to provide site data to make their algorithm smarter. After realizing this, I removed the site from Google Webmaster Tools and soon after... boom! My site was back on page #1.