Tuesday, August 01, 2006
Google trouble or when search engines drive you crazy …
There are so many nice Google tools like sitemaps and analytics, but sometimes I have the impression, the good old site:graylion.net search option is a way to get in touch with a history no one is aware of anymore.
We tried a couple of ways to convince the Google bot, like disallow options in the robots.txt file or manually removing old links via http://services.google.com:8882/urlconsole/controller?cmd=siteDown all does not seem to work. Even though the expected 404 messages appear, Google throws a blind eye at them.
We also amended our categories like clothing, crockery, jewellery, footwear or toys with page titles but none of them seems to appear in the results. What is also weird is the fact, that some of the visits listed in Google analytics seems to be unknown to the bot itself.
This leaves one conclusion – Google does not like our new Fetish and Fashion Store at the moment and it's the same with our toy section in Afterdark, but the fight for proper stats goes on. Maybe our lovely indian (also called Apache) together with mod_rewrite will actually do the trick and allow us to throw a nice HTTP Error 410: Gone at all the guys still requesting old pages :-)
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