September 26, 2006
Google Hates Me
I was wondering why Google isn't at all interested in most of my pages. I mean I was hoping at least a few things (like for example Mechanical Dream Names) would show up, since I think I put up some decent content for them. I was appalled when Alan pointed out to me that a search for site:www.digitalchangeling.com turns up two pages, both of which are my interior pixel doll art pages, not my front page.
I am so deeply confused by this weirdness. Why does Google hate me?
Anyway, I was trying to figure out some way to get Google to crawl my site (even if I don't show up in many searches, I'd prefer they at least pretend my pages exist!) and found Google's page for adding a url manually. Oh, I thought, this should work just great. So I added in http://www.digitalchangeling.com and hoped that would solve my problem eventually.
Sure enough, the next day I ran the site:... search again most of my pages (at least the big ones) showed up. I felt much better.
Well, until I ran the search again today. Now it's back to just finding those same two pages! What on Earth have I done to make you hate me so much Google? I mean I use you all the time as my search engine. I even use Froogle and am a loyal Gmail-ite... Why have you betrayed me?
I had run across the Google Webmaster Tools previously so now that the add url thing hadn't done anything to help me, I thought maybe I would try the webmaster tools. So I signed up, verified my url and then discovered that unless I can figure out the site map functionality (which is not seeming terribly obvious) the tools are not going to help me fix this problem. The tools even have the gaul to tell me there are no crawl errors of any sort on my webpage. If there are no crawl errors, why aren't you finding my pages, Google?
I'm starting to think the only logical conclusion is that Google has decided to shun me for some perceived slight. Alternately I guess it might be possible that someone has it in for me and has found a way to tell Google that my pages suck/don't exist. I can't imagine how or where I would have made an enemy like that though. When I looked up how one goes about telling Google not to go to a page, it looked like their answer was forbid the Googlebot with your robots.txt file, which I don't have one of at all, so that can't be it.
Overall I am very frustrated with this. I mean I've spent hours and hours trying to put useful (or at least amusing) content up and now almost no one is going to be able to find it.
Comments:Well, now that I've registered a site map via the web tools Google seems happy with my site for everyone, except me on my home computer. The site search stubbornly turns up two pages on my laptop, while it is fine and happy (and shows most of my pages) on my boyfriend's computer as he sits next to me on the couch. Argh!Post a Comment
(Shift + Reload has been to no avail.)
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