Google Insider?

Published 13 October 04 by Justin French, 12 comments

The Story

I’ve had this site running since July, Googlebot visits about 60 times a month, I have some nice inbound links from the CSS Vault, Merlin and pretty much every blog that I post comments to. But Google refuses to list me.

Over on the TextDrive Forums I first thought it might be something server side, but other sites on TextDrive “a few folders over” are doing fine. Then we thought it could be Textpattern’s query string URLs, but others site have no problems with that either.

I added an “allow everything” robots.txt file, included a “index,follow” meta tag, and still nothing. I re-submitted my URL to Google a few times, nothing. Of course Google were happy to sign me up for AdSense though!

Yahoo has me indexed just fine, but it’s interesting to note that A9 doesn’t (and the results look a lot like Google’s).

Where it’s at

First things first, they say that being listed on Google can take up to 6 months, so perhaps I’m just far too impatient.

But I haven’t owned this domain very long, and my current thinking is that the previous owner “played up” and got blacklisted – although I have no way of knowing for sure.

I’ve sent an email to two relevant Google email address’, read all the FAQs I could find, and have done everything they suggest to do. Apparently I just sit and wait.

My plea

What I’m hoping is that someone within this little network has a contact at Google, or “knows someone who knows someone” who might be able to give me a little hint as to what the problem might be. I eagerly await the collective wisdom of my readers.

Update Oct 16

Google have actually replied to a support email – within 6 days!! It’s not much, but it’s a start.

Thank you for your note. We understand your concern and have passed your message on to our engineering team for further investigation. We appreciate your patience.

Update Oct 28

Andrew has pointed out that Google now knows me, which is a great start. Other searches also seem to be working, so I’m a happy, happy man indeed.

Thanks to everyone for their help! Now, back to writing content…