Google launched a pinging service for their blog search today. Much like Ping-o-matic, the service allows bloggers to inform the world of new content. This is the first time, however, that we have been able to directly alert Google that a site has been updated. It will be interesting to see how this is used by the SEO crowd.
Forum 30, as it is often referred to, is a favorite online hangout for many who find that it is necessary to complain about Google’s endeavors. Forum member ClintFC summed up these problems quite well in a recent post:
All of Google’s current problems seem to be rooted in a single inalienable truth:Granted, this comment was left in a discussion on whether Google’s algorithm are up to the task of determining whether two sites are related and/or relevant, two terms that are often thrown around casually in such forums. But I believe that this explanation holds true for much more than the core of Google’s business. AdWords and AdSense have certainly been affected.
Google currently believe themselves to be much smarter than they actually are.
Why is it that when you search Google for “http”, Microsoft is the first result? I first stumbled upon this when clicking on a malformed URL in Firefox. Try it for yourself. Since Firefox fires off a Google search on URLs it doesn’t understand, every HTTP URL that doubles up on the “http://” part is sent to Microsoft by Firefox. This just seems wrong on some level.
I was watching some logs today, just to see how much traffic was being forwarded from this site’s former domain, and I found this interesting bit:206.196.125.91 - - [24/Feb/2006:13:20:53 -0600] "GET /index.xml HTTP/1.1" 301 247 "-" "BlogSearch/1.1 +http://www.icerocket.com/"
206.196.125.91 - - [24/Feb/2006:13:20:53 -0600] "GET /index.rdf HTTP/1.1" 301 247 "-" "BlogSearch/1.1 +http://www.icerocket.com/"
206.196.125.91 - - [24/Feb/2006:13:20:53 -0600] "GET /index.xml HTTP/1.1" 301 247 "-" "BlogSearch/1.1 +http://www.icerocket.com/"
206.196.125.91 - - [24/Feb/2006:13:20:54 -0600] "GET /index.rdf HTTP/1.1" 301 247 "-" "BlogSearch/1.1 +http://www.icerocket.com/"
206.196.125.91 - - [24/Feb/2006:13:21:07 -0600] "GET /index.xml HTTP/1.1" 301 247 "-" "BlogSearch/1.1 +http://www.icerocket.com/"
206.196.125.91 - - [24/Feb/2006:13:21:07 -0600] "GET /index.rdf HTTP/1.1" 301 247 "-" "BlogSearch/1.1 +http://www.icerocket.com/"
206.196.125.91 - - [24/Feb/2006:13:22:32 -0600] "GET /index.xml HTTP/1.1" 301 247 "-" "BlogSearch/1.1 +http://www.icerocket.com/"
206.196.125.91 - - [24/Feb/2006:13:22:32 -0600] "GET /index.rdf HTTP/1.1" 301 247 "-" "BlogSearch/1.1 +http://www.icerocket.com/"
And then, a few minutes later, there was this:
206.196.125.91 - - [24/Feb/2006:13:25:51 -0600] "GET /index.xml HTTP/1.1" 301 247 "-" "BlogSearch/1.1 +http://www.icerocket.com/"
206.196.125.91 - - [24/Feb/2006:13:25:51 -0600] "GET /index.rdf HTTP/1.1" 301 247 "-" "BlogSearch/1.1 +http://www.icerocket.com/"
206.196.125.101 - - [24/Feb/2006:13:26:04 -0600] "GET /index.xml HTTP/1.1" 301 247 "-" "BlogSearch/1.1 +http://www.icerocket.com/"
206.196.125.101 - - [24/Feb/2006:13:26:04 -0600] "GET /index.rdf HTTP/1.1" 301 247 "-" "BlogSearch/1.1 +http://www.icerocket.com/"
206.196.125.91 - - [24/Feb/2006:13:26:08 -0600] "GET /index.xml HTTP/1.1" 301 247 "-" "BlogSearch/1.1 +http://www.icerocket.com/"
206.196.125.91 - - [24/Feb/2006:13:26:08 -0600] "GET /index.rdf HTTP/1.1" 301 247 "-" "BlogSearch/1.1 +http://www.icerocket.com/"
206.196.125.91 - - [24/Feb/2006:13:26:09 -0600] "GET /index.rdf HTTP/1.1" 301 247 "-" "BlogSearch/1.1 +http://www.icerocket.com/"
206.196.125.91 - - [24/Feb/2006:13:26:09 -0600] "GET /index.xml HTTP/1.1" 301 247 "-" "BlogSearch/1.1 +http://www.icerocket.com/"
206.196.125.91 - - [24/Feb/2006:13:26:09 -0600] "GET /index.xml HTTP/1.1" 301 247 "-" "BlogSearch/1.1 +http://www.icerocket.com/"
206.196.125.91 - - [24/Feb/2006:13:26:09 -0600] "GET /index.rdf HTTP/1.1" 301 247 "-" "BlogSearch/1.1 +http://www.icerocket.com/"
206.196.125.101 - - [24/Feb/2006:13:26:09 -0600] "GET /index.xml HTTP/1.1" 301 247 "-" "BlogSearch/1.1 +http://www.icerocket.com/"
206.196.125.101 - - [24/Feb/2006:13:26:09 -0600] "GET /index.rdf HTTP/1.1" 301 247 "-" "BlogSearch/1.1 +http://www.icerocket.com/"
It’s bad enough that IceRocket’s blog search is still pulling these URLs, which have been 301’ed for a long time now, but it’s really annoying when the crawler sends back to back requests, ignoring the 301 each time. The 301 status code has been a part of HTTP for quite some time. Why can’t a search engine get this simple detail right?
A little tidbit for the SEO community slipped out on Matt Cutts’ blog yesterday:
“Just to give you a heads-up, I think a new set of backlinks (and possibly PageRank) will probably be visible relatively soon; Iâm guessing within the next few days.”Even though he goes on to say that this will result in a bit of flux afterwards, I certainly hope that the Google results will be consistent after this is over. I have two laptops on the table in front of me right now. When I enter certain searches that I have been monitoring on Google, I see completely different results from the two machines. On one machine, I see that my site has some 40,000 pages in Google’s index. On the other machine, there are around 15 pages. This is not good. Hopefully they will fix this soon.