It seems Google has broken up with me. Not only did they not do it in person, they didn’t call or even bother to email me to let me know they have moved on from our relationship. This blog (not all of digitalpoint.com, only this blog) has some sort of weird partial ban from the Google index. I noticed it after seeing this thread, but was reminded about it again from this thread in my forum.
Googlebot (not Mediapartners) still spiders this blog at the rate of 400-500 pages per day, but the spidered pages never make it to the Google search index. It makes me wonder if Google is looking for something specific to be “fixed” and not finding whatever it’s looking for.
Here’s what makes me think it has a partial ban…
I only have supplemental results in the Google index:
//www.google.com/search?q=inurl:www.shawnhogan.com/
The supplemental results show snippets from January 23, 2005 and before, yet sometimes the cache shows more up to date content (sometimes not though):
//www.google.com/search?q=cache:www.shawnhogan.com/
No pages from 2005 are in the index (yet they are spidered daily).
This page has no PageRank (last I looked it was PageRank 6 in December, 2004).
I’ve contacted Google a couple times about it… usually I don’t get a response, but a couple times I got a generic response telling me to read their webmaster guidelines (which I have). Since they tell me to read their guidelines, I’m taking that as some sort of affirmation that I am banned. I know it wouldn’t be good for Google as a whole to give specific reasons about why a site/blog is banned, but in my case I honestly don’t have the faintest idea of what it could possibly be. So it makes whatever “it” is impossible to correct. The best guess I can come up with (which obviously isn’t the case, I’m just making a point that I have no idea) is that I switched from Blogger to WordPress for this blog.
Maybe I’m just getting old. Google has found someone prettier that they like better now that I turned 30. 🙁
Oh well… at least I have the fond memories of when we were in love and frolicked through the fields. 🙂
I doubt this has anything to do with it, but when you try to open up your xml feed… http://www.shawnhogan.com/feed/atom/ my browser doesn’t detect that it is XML or even text.
Of course I use IE though.
Use a “real” browser. Feed looks fine to me in Safari and Firefox. 🙂
That’s one harsh break up if you ask me. Some people/internet sites have no heart.
Take a look in the blog index.
http://www.google.co.uk/blogsearch?hl=en&q=link%3Awww.digitalpoint.com&btnG=Search+Blogs
I’m seeing an entry for your new computer posted on the site as of today.
G seem to be doing some strange stuff when it comes to indexing blogs at present.
Yeah, I know. What I’m saying though is that the feed might not be returning a text header telling the browser and such that it is a text file.
This is just me grasping at straws. This really has my got my interest though.
Personally though, I blame the borg.
I noticed your domain expires in April 2006. The sites that I saw ranking well that are new all seem to be registered for 5 years into the future…Anyone with any thoughts on this?