Sebastian's Pamphlets: Google Blog Search Banned Legit Webmaster Forum

Monday, February 26, 2007

Google Blog Search Banned Legit Webmaster Forum

I've been able to get all sorts of non-blog stuff onto the SERPs of Google's blog search in the past. However, my attempt to get contents hosted by Google into blog search is best described as miserable failure. Although Google Blog Search BETA delivers results from all kind of forums, it obviously can't deal with threaded content from a source which recently got rid of its BETA stage.

First I've tried to ping blog search, submitted feeds, linked to threads from here and in a feed regulary fetched for blog search as well. No results. No robots.txt barriers or noindex tags, just badly malformed code but Google's bot can eat not properly closed alternate links pointing to an RSS feed ... drove me nuts. Must be a ban or at least a heavy troll-penalty I thought, went to Yahoo, masked the feed URLs, submitted again but no avail.

Try for yourself, submit a feed to Google Blog Search, then use a somewhat unique thread title and do a blog search. Got zilch too? Try a web search to double check that the content is crawlable. It is. Conclusion? Google banned its very own Google Groups.

Too sad, poor PageRank addicts running blog searches will miss out on tidbits like this quote from Google's Adam Lasnik, asked why URLs blocked from crawlers show toolbar-PR:

As for the PR showing... it's my understanding that the toolbar is using non-private info (PR data from other pages in that domain) to extrapolate/infer/guess a PR for that page :).

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1 Comments:

At Monday, February 26, 2007, Sebastian said…

To clarify, blog search was also a feed search not purely restricted to content put up with a blogish CMS. This has changed over time, some non-blog feeds are still searchable, but the majority of all results is from blogs nowadays. That's distressing IMHO.

I was just searching for a neat procedure to track google group posts by topic, because group-searches don't provide an RSS feed. I admit the title of this post is somewhat obfuscating, thus tagged as "fun".