Various interesting things...

My last MJBlog entry 'return of the MJBlog' was written late on Jan 25, spidered by Googlebot during the night and was appearing in Google's index from Jan 28, which is pretty cool considering one of my clients Round Peg have been having a terrible time getting listed at all recently, or 're-listed' to be more precise.

Up until around November 04 Round Peg traded as Harlequin and used the web address www.harlequinobh.com which appeared in Google like lots of other relatively small and simple 'about us' online brochures. Durung the re-branding of the company the site was scaled down to a single holding page, a new domain name was pointed at the web-space and then new content published. The combination of the name being changed and a there being practically no content available for a few weeks didn't do the site any favours with Google, but the site never actually dissappeared from Google's index - not until Google's index nearly doubled in size to over 8 billion pages.

[ Jan 29 2005, 19:20 ]

A Google glitch?

According to Google's information for webmasters there are several reasons why a site might disappear from their index. Most are to do with problems with the site itself such as a site not being up and running at the time Googlebot hits it, although there is an admission that it's possible for there to occaisonally be a "glitch on our side".

Glitches have been rather more common since Google's rapid increase in size and not for the first time. A couple of years ago or so a young search upstart called AllTheWeb appeared from relative obscurity to proclaim itself to be the largest search index around at 3 billion or so pages. Within days Google practically doubled the figure displayed on its home page from around 2 billion to over 4 billion pages which remained roughly the size of things until MSN launched its long-awaited crawler-based index of 5 billion pages towards the end of 2004. Almost immediately Google doubled again to a figure, as I write this, of a little over 8 billion or so.

Whether or not this recent huge increase was rushed in order to minimise the impact of MSN's launch one can only guess, but I've certainly noticed a few more glitches than normal since, such as pages appearing to have been cached in the 1960s, websites reverting to earlier versions or worse, as in the case of round-peg.com dissappearing altogether.

One can never be sure, but I can't help feeling that large chunks of Google's index have reverted to an earlier version. Round-peg contacted Google after their site disappeared seemingly never to return and recently a copy of the old harlequinobh.com site has appeared with a cache-date of 25 March 2004. There are a few things still to try, such as disabling the obsolete harlequinoblh domain names and increasing the number of links to www.round-peg.com, (like this), but what effect these measures might have in helping the new site get re-listed only time will tell.