In a previous post, I wrote about some of my back blog archives falling out of my custom Google Adsense domain search.
I also opened at Help Ticket at Typepad and submitted a copy of my post to the Tech Support people there. As usual, I did get a helpful response. I've always had good contact with people from Six Apart and I appreciate that. I just wanted to share with others what Typepad had to say about the issue I raised:
Hi Chris,
Thank you for your feedback on this. While we did make the change you're referring to to help with performance, this should not have an adverse affect on how Google indexes older posts on a weblog.
The Recent Posts listing typically links to posts that most users still have on their index page and this is the case for your weblog as well. You may want to try contacting Google about this issue directly as they may have some insight on this for you. We have not made any changes in TypePad that would cause this.
Please let us know if you have any other questions.
This is a bit of a relief, because I want to continue to trust Typepad to do right by me. And second, whenever one has a technical problem, it is good to eliminate the obvious technical glitches first, before jumping to those bigger philosophical issues.
Now I must contact Google with the same questions, probably through the inside of my Adsense account. However, in my response to the Help Ticket above, I thought of another possiblity that may explain why Google would do something so UN-Google-like.
Here's what I wrote:
I appreciate the clarification. I really did not want to believe that the indexing change on Typepad would make permalinks and the keyword indexes disappear from Google.
The thing is, Google is a Hoover. It hoovers up everything. It has designs on hoovering up all gmail email files. It wants a kitchen sink data set. Inclusive, not exclusive. We have to tell Google NOT to hoover up our sites, make our sites invisible to Google, for private family photo albums and such. So why would my back permalinks fall off the Google index if they are still out there for the Google bots to crawl? Could something be blocking Google's bots from crawling down some of Typepad's link paths?
The only other thing I could imagine is if Google thought my sites were a link farm. But my sites don't look anything like link farm sites. They have ideas, strung together, sense to be made, to the best of my ability.
Philosophically, I must admit I'm having this same problem on email, and I've written about it in a past CNN.com column: email spam filters think my emails are spam, and they are not. I'm not even forwarding silly jokes like my mother does. But I can't even send a colleague at work an article that may help him work on a story, because the email filter thinks sending a story is spam and not bona fide research. SINCE WHEN?
The only other thing I can think of is that I've seen link farm sites that are lifting whole posts off my site and republishing them on link farms. The only reason I find them is they show up on Technorati with my words on them. So if Google decided the content of MY POSTS are tainted by the link farms should be nuked them out of their Hoover system, then there have to be a ton of people being plagiarized by link farms who are being INCORRECTLY nuked out of Google.
I wonder if the link farm plagiarizers are themselves hoovering up older site archives, banking on the fact that the owners might not be paying attention, or that the sites might be inactive or abandoned.
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