Sunday, December 31, 2006
Another odd Google hiccup
Huh, weird. When I search for "boingboing," "boing boing," or "boingboing.net," as of yesterday "http://www.boingboing.net" is suddenly not the first result in Google -- in fact, it seems to come up as #37 at best, in any combination of search terms. Some two- and three-year-old permalinks from our archives pop up along with other sites that have nothing to do with BoingBoing.net. I wonder what's behind it -- perhaps Google's tweaking blog results over the holidays, and this is related to the conditions that caused the "disappearing sex blogs" reported by Violet Blue and others last week. Any Google folks out there who can help us sort that out? What should bloggers do when they notice anomalies like this -- what's the best way to alert or assist Google? I'm poking around in Webmaster Central for self-help tools, but ending up kind of frustrated. Thanks to the BB readers who wrote in about this.
Update: I've asked some friends to poke around with the search terms listed above -- some get "http://www.boingboing.net", others get years-old permalinks and unrelated websites, in varying orders. When I try the search strings through proxy servers, or with Tor, I get different results. [shrugs].
Previously on BoingBoing:
posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:50:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments
