Copyright ©1997-2008 Glenn Fleishman except as noted otherwise. All rights reserved. For permission to reprint, contact Glenn Fleishman at glenn at glennf.com. Photo © 2008 Laurence Chen; used with permission.
Copyright ©1997-2008 Glenn Fleishman except as noted otherwise. All rights reserved. For permission to reprint, contact Glenn Fleishman at glenn at glennf.com. Photo © 2008 Laurence Chen; used with permission.
Turning technology from mumbo-jumbo into rich tasty gumbo
� Working Like a Dog, Woof | Main | Too Stupid to Understand It �Update! Good news. It looks like the dropping of isbn.nu may be related to Google's inability to reach it during a crawl (although I can't see any sustained interruptions in our service in the last few months that affected isbn.nu's DNS or our network connection). Which makes sense as Brian's first part of his article didn't mention my techniques for being indexed. More news as it develops.
Another update: More good news. Google uncovered that their algorithms for stopping spammers seemed to have branded my site as such because of the massive numbers of redirects from my pages. Every book price results page has from 0 to 9 redirects (via an internal script) to the bookstores referenced. I should see a return of my content to Google in a few days, starting with the root pages.
Original Item
My isbn.nu site has been branded, and not in the marketing sense. Google has dropped the 135,000 or so listings from my site from their index on Feb. 22, the day after Brian Livingston of Infoworld published part 1 of 2 articles about my site's indexing and commercial strategy (part 1, part 2).
What's ironic here, of course, is that I'm not a search engine spammer. The isbn.nu site uses a licensed data dump of over 2 million titles, which I transform into an index that can be traversed like a tree from page to page. Because I create static URLs that index to dynamic content, but each page is unique (i.e., the author page for Brian Livingston always lists the current set of books by Brian Livingston), I'm adhering to the highest principles of making a site accessible, traversible, and unique.
Not only have I discussed the site with Larry Page, who thought it was a great thing, but I've talked to several other Googlers who are well aware of me, and like the site and my approach. So I'm assuming it was an overzealous employee scanning the press for any mention of Google and lots of pages in the index. I'm going through a friendly channel at the moment to track down why I was dropped, but the concidence of Feb. 22 and the day after Livingston's article are way too high.
Posted by Glennf at March 6, 2002 7:27 AM TrackBack URL for this entry: Page and Brin seem pretty insistent that there are no "tweaks" to the Google engine; that if it needs a blacklist, there's something wrong with the algorithm. That may have changed since they last said that, but it's another factor against assuming a manual purge. Posted by: Danny O'Brien at March 7, 2002 8:16 AM Ok, so what is the "cloaking" that search engines downgrade websites for? also... what in the world is up with the URLs linking to different things off the infoworld site??? Posted by: Eric at March 6, 2002 11:41 AM Interesting about the isbn.nu site (a wonderful place BTW). A good deal of my website is structured in teh same manner, mapping a directory like tree to dynamic pages. Posted by: Eric at March 6, 2002 11:26 AM Sites disappear and then reappear in Google all the time due to the way the update their index. I was very confuse about this back in October and sent an e-mail asking for an explanation. I received a nice e-mail back, which I've posted here: http://brian.carnell.com/articles/2001/11/000020.html Posted by: Brian Carnell at March 6, 2002 10:04 AM I suspect that your listings' disappearance may have a non-sinister explanation; there's something weird going on at Google. During the past two weeks I've witnessed Google going back and forth between an old version of the index and a new one, with a cycle of about one day or less. On one moment, they have a fresh version of my site cached and indexed, an hour later it's gone, replaced with a months old cached copy. It's going on as I write this. Posted by: Marko Karppinen at March 6, 2002 9:25 AM
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