[ic] more google woes...

[Kevin Walsh]

Tom Hodder [tom at ecnow.co.uk] wrote:
> I had been working on getting my current prototype site submitted to
> google, and had a reasonable amount of success, for example a search for
> "QCA Design Technology" on google used to return my site, and the correct
> interchange page with the full deep path, the the right product would be
> the first link. 
> 
> Now google have done something odd, and all the old listings have
> returned, showing a load of broken links (from the old site), and all my
> new ic deeply indexed links have gone. I noticed this, because there was
> a big drop in google referrals, and an increase in 404 errors on
> 20/2/2004. 
> 
> Any ideas on what could have caused that? One thing that I did do, was add
> meta description and meta keywords to the left/right/top and left/top
> templates, earlier in the week. I could understand how google might
> change the way it indexes the current pages as a result of that, but I
> can't see how it would start returning really old results.
> 
Google ignores the various META keywords and descriptions, as they
are often abused, so your changes wouldn't have affected anything.
Check your logs - has a Googlebot visited you since you made the
changes you mentioned?

If your links are clearly from your old website then perhaps Google
is just having problems at the moment (restored an old backup?).
Their spider will visit you soon to correct any index entries that are
found to be out of date.

My suggestion is to wait for a couple of weeks after the next Google
spider visit and then check your index entries again.

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