I assume mouser that you didn't really change the robots.txt with the move anyway, so that's probably not the explanation. Yes?

- Oshyan

I found some interesting settings in the webmaster tools site for donationcoder.com, not sure how they got this way, OR if they have any impact, but given that the topic parameter is what signifies what page of forum posts the user is reading, it seems kind of important.



I've changed them, lets' see if it has any effect.  Of course because this is google there is no way to get a straight answer about if it will have an effect, how long it will take to see any change, etc.

That looks like parameters from the robots.txt. Google is allowing us to manually set priority to the crawled content. Now you can decide what to let in or out. Except 'search', all other pages should be let google decide.

Are things getting better? From what I understand, it has only indexed at least one recent topic: http://www.google.com/search?q=site:donationcoder.com/forum+shockingly&hl=en&safe=off&client=opera&tbo=1&rls=en&channel=suggest&prmdo=1&prmd=ivns&tbas=0 (although I think it only indexed this one topic)

A week or two after i submitted a request to google to "re-index the site" here is the response i just got.

You have to love the deliberate obfuscation, deniability, and general deliberate doubletalk fog of the reply:

We received a request from a site owner to reconsider how we index the following site: http://www.donationcoder.com/.
We've now reviewed your site. When we review a site, we check to see if it's in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines. If we don't find any problems, we'll reconsider our indexing of your site. If your site still doesn't appear in our search results, check our Help Center for steps you can take.

So..

In other words they've reviewed the site and checked to see if its in violation or if there are any problems.  But they don't feel like telling us if they found any problems.  And therefore they might or might not eventually reconsider re-indexing the site at some point in the future.  And if they do or don't decide to do this, that's their little secret -- and we should go search the web one day if we eventually come to the conclusion that enough time has passed that something should have changed.

Google -- proof that when you get big enough, you just don't have to give a f*ck about people.

I agree, that's a pretty crappy response. In general I do find Google's "support" to be pretty bad. They pretty much put stuff out there in whatever condition it's in and the best you can do is hope it works. If it doesn't, you generally can't expect to talk to anyone, much less ever find out why, or IF it might be fixed, nevermind *when*. That being said, I wonder if there are some legal issues in terms of search and "fairness" that make them want to stick to vague responses.

- Oshyan

Looks like this is fixed, right? I can see results in google for stuff posted yesterday.
On a related note, how's the pagerank now?

It may be a long time still before we get our page rank back, or not -- only google knows and they don't tell us lowly mortals what they do or why.

But at least the urls are gradually being picked up from the sitemap, and new threads seem to be indexed very quickly now, within hours, so that's the really important thing.  (when and whether google actually ranks our results high on the page i do not know).

PageRank can go F* itself.

We are now up to 50% coverage of the sitemap (the sitemap in question basically represents 25,000 most recent forum threads) and forum posts are now in google an hour or two after they are posted, which is actually pretty darn impressive on google's part.  And sitemap coverage has been going up daily .

We became almost invisible there for a while, but it seems like people should be able to find our forum content pretty well now when they do a web search, and it's only getting better.  And that's a good thing