Webstart Blog

This blog has a funny thing happening to it! On the day it went properly live, which was the 5th December 2007, it was picked up by Google in an incredibly short time - no more than 30 minutes! I was astounded and kept checking the SERPS and yes it was true, imblogingit.com was indexed with links to all the posts - even the default wordpress “hello world” post which I hadn’t had time to remove!

Now, today I had a quick check and ‘hmmmm’ the blog is no where to be seen! Doing a site:www.imblogingit.com search in Google just came up with the old test pages - we were using this domain as a test bed for a clients new remote control models website (www.apexmodels.com). Where had the blog posts gone that had been indexed so quickly?

So now I’m doing a little experiment, I have removed the sitemap from Google webmaster tools and then reinstated it, also I’m posting this post which will auto generate a new sitemap and ping Google to let them know. Now just keep an eye on SERPS every now and then to see if the posts show up again… I’ll keep you updated.

Update 1: 10:15 - On checking Google with site:imblogingit.com (leaving off the www.) the blog pages are showing, interestingly with the www. on the urls.

Update 2: 11:30 - The site:www.imblogingit.com search is now showing the blog posts again! The new post is not showing up yet but Google picked up the new sitemap after about 10 minutes! 

Update 3: 01:00 8/12/07 - Well I’ve been out this evening at a Christmas party in London so I’m a little jaded - but - now I have checked and all but one link on the blog has fallen out of the Google again - what on earth is going on!

Update 4: 08:40 10/12/07 - Two pages from the blog are showing in the index, the ‘about’ page and the December archive. No sign of the individual posts yet.

Update 5: 08:29 11/12/07 - OK some things have changed in the SERPS, the index page and the login page are now in the main index. The December archives have slipped into the supplementals and the Keywords are dead - long live content  article has also made it into the supplementals. Yesterday I installed the All In One SEO plugin for Wordpress which should avoid content duplication - lets see how much that changes things.

Update 6: 13:50 12/12/07 - No change!

Update 7: 21:20 13/12/07 - The home page and keywords post are in the index (keywords was in supplimentals), the login and December archives have fallen out.

Update 8: 11:39 15/12/07 - Things are looking up a bit, 4 pages now in the main index: home, about, 301 redirect and keywords posts. Nothing in supplimentals and just need the latest post to arrive in the index and we are done!

There is an interesting post from John Mueller on the Google Webmaster Central Blog about meta tags and how Google interprets them. John lists the important tags that have some functionality when it comes to Google indexing the web page, he also lists some that have no effect. There was one tag that John had not included - the meta keyword tag.

Check Johns post and see the first comment asking him what Google do with the keyword tag - you will notice who the comment came from - I asked him:

“I notice that you do not mention the keywords meta tag - does this mean that Google totally ignores it?”

John’s reply confirmed my suspicions…

“Thanks for asking, Glen! You’re right in that we generally ignore the contents of the “keywords” meta tag. As with other possible meta tags, feel free to place it on your pages if you can use it for other purposes - it won’t count against you.”.

So there we have it straight from the horses mouth (no offence John) - Google IGNORE the keywords meta tag.

This comes as no surprise to a lot of people heavily into search engine optimisation but up until now it had not been confirmed and the meta tag was still being used as an active tag for improving search engine results.

Now all those keywords you thought were working in the meta tags need to be in the page content, not a problem for most websites, unless you were spamming keywords but of course no one did that - did they?