Ah, this explains everything

Google Madness. I used to find things I'd written by using Google pointed at this site. Some while ago this simply stopped working; you could even find some random page, copy a unique chunk of text out of it and paste it right into the Google search box in the sidebar, and it wouldn't find the page you were on. Some stuff, sure, and my site was still in the index (Google for “Richard Newman”), but not every page.

Yahoo! Search, on the other hand, worked perfectly every time. (Logging on to my server and using grep, of course, also worked, but isn't so easy to link to!)

I assume that this is because almost all of my entries have only two inbound links, from my archive views, each of which is set to noindex,follow. If my archive ever stopped being indexed, Google wouldn't even see any of my individual posts, and it might discard them anyway because of low link counts. It's puzzling that Google will happily run ads and search on a site, but not index its pages. Surely AdSense quality will fall commensurately?

Let's see how tough it is to switch to a Yahoo! search box….

Posted at 2006-05-25 09:44:28 by Richard • Link to Ah, this explains …
Comments, trackbacks.