Just a quick note to those who might think that big names are immune to sandboxing at Google: Techmeme isn't ranking in the first 250 results for its name, despite having one of the tech industry's most robust reputations and a very enviable link profile (bolstered by a huge influx on the announcement of the popular news site's move).
Since Matt's out of town, we'll have to rely on another Googler who reads SEOmoz to pick this up and take care of it. Honestly, though, why does this still happen? Wherever the sandboxing threshold is right now, you guys need to lower it a bit further.
p.s. For some odd reason, Google isn't even indexing the pages. Yahoo! and MSN have it down. Even Ask has done some indexing.
So... this is AdamLinkBait, right? I'm somewhat reluctant to respond after being "summoned" :)... but I should note that I came across this during a daily skim of the blogosphere, not due to any magical AdamInvocation.
Clear? Great! So a few thoughts on the issue at hand: - My personal preference is to avoid talking about specific sites, particularly with someone that's not the site owner. - My ego ("vanity") tag on my blog-reading list is actually below google, seo, search, and other (many!) tags. And no, "Adam" and "Adam 2.0" are not in my vanity search ;) - As Aaron suggested, I do lots of things here, including travel; I hope to meet lots of y'all at SES London.
Hey Adam! Thanks for stopping by; it wasn't my intent to "summon", just to point out an issue. And yes, I'll definitely see you in London next week!
No worries! See you soon...
Ah, glad that Adam has my RSS list covered. Anyway, the search [techmeme] returned the correct home page for me just now.
Matt - you should be proud. I think Adam had it fixed up within 24 hours of commenting here.
Seems to me this is the problem: https://www.furl.net/forward.jsp?id=8356270 Run it through a header checker. 302 redirect. I found this on page three for an allintitle:techmeme search. There may be others causing problems, and there are certainly alot of flaws in Google's index. You can find more information on the 302 hijacking bug on Claus Schmidt's site. Being recently registered, techmeme.com probably fell under the bug before Google could index and attribute the links correctly after 301 redirecting tech.memeorandum.com. Everything seems fine as far as linking absolutely within the site, but I would recommend that they use a redirect from the non-www to the www for techmeme.com.
IMHO Google's a bit messed up indexing stuff now but clearly looks like somethings not quite right there. If you want to get the new guys attention use his name to link drop, I'm pretty sure he has an ego search RSS feed set up.
Or just ask graywolf to post questions for Google in his blog, he always gets quick answers. :) Actually it is more likely legit questions get quick answers right? Simply pointing out that Google is choking on something for a few days is not a good question. I highly suspect that lame techmeme aggregator is doing something stupid.
I chatted with Adam v2.0 via email tonight and he seems like a nice enough fellah who does multiple tasks including travel for Google, he is most likely just a secretary for Matt when he is away and traveled to pubcon to educate himself about what it is exactly Matt Cutts does. Having a backup is smart business, even if your backup is not an expert he can escalate any questions that need immediate answers.
You guys should feel lucky you get such quick response, the typical webmaster like myself has to fight it out in Google Groups but this is changing, the conversation is open to those who contribute.
And link baiting appears to also get less response, time to get real?
That is an aggregator right?
Their Meta-Tags are a little bit special: Meta-Tag "Refresh". Never tried that on a page for Google, so I can only speculate that Google generally don´t like that?