Page banned from Google?
So for the past month and a half I’ve been puzzling over northcarolinagenealogy.net and it’s mysterious sudden disappearance from google. I mean… let’s see, there are a couple hundred posts there. It uses the same template as this and the South Carolina genealogy site do. Nothing really different than the South Carolina Genealogy site (more posts…?) I don’t have any links to “bad neighborhoods” that I can tell over there, but doing a site:northcarolinagenealogy.net search at either google.com or blogsearch.google.com turns up NOTHING. (While similar searches for southcarolinagenealogy.org or averyjparker.com turn up scads of pages, and a November search would show the same for northcarolinagenealgy.net)
Well, I’ve puzzled over this for some time, maybe it’s the wikipedia content I’ve used? I’ve tried to provide some of my own content there too though, and I have wikipedia sourced content at southcarolinagenealogy.org as well, that’s still in google…. there is more at NC genealogy. I just couldn’t quite get an understanding for why one site would vanish like that and another stay in.
I think I may have had an “aha” moment today though. I was reading about google’s dislike for redirects and it turns out that my 404 error page that I had made for the folder that the site was in original (and another subfolder or two) had an automatic redirect to northcarolinagenealogy.net (10 second redirect). I thought it would be convenient for anyone that had an outdated link. From what I’ve been reading, Google may have thought I was trying to trick it.
So, I’ve spent the day, using .htaccess redirects to sort things to the appropriate domains and changed all the 404 pages. Hopefully that will be enough that now I can go and ask nicely for a second look from Google. In the meantime, I’ve got a pretty big influx of traffic from requests for pages from the old site…..