Come And Watch Me Sink On Google
November 26th, 2007
After deleting my whole blog (accidentally on purpose) I’m now faced with Ireland SEO Marketing being plunged from the top positions on Google until never found again. At first I was going to sit back and enjoy the show but then realised Google does not have the intelligence to figure out what has just happened so I may as well do something about it and share the info.
When Google revisits a site and notices that content has disappeared they simply don’t say ‘hey that page no longer exists, no point coming back to this URL’, they actually do the opposite by saying ‘hey I can’t find that page; let’s come back later and check’ and the funny part is that’s Google being intelligent. They already know that when a page is not available it could be for a variety of reasons one which being the actual web server not available, network issue or a reboot would spring to mind. They know to come back and double check to see if the disappeared content is available again so it’s a smart move for them to get the info they wanted in the first place.
Right now Google has 141 URL’s indexed that belong to my old blog. I’ve thousands of keywords showing up in their results some of which are in top positions but if you look, those URL’s no longer exist. Now this is where Google is being complete thickos, they are just going to keep coming back requesting those 141 URL’s that don’t exist and they have no idea that I’ve deleted every single one. As it stands, things are in a right mess. I’ve non existent URL’s ranking within Google, I have them requesting those URL’s and I want to start a fresh blog but more importantly I don’t want to loose my current domain ranking for the different key terms (just to keep competing sites on the ball).
People would say that I need to do SEO to get this fixed but I’ll say this has nothing to do with optimisation, this is troubleshooting Search Engines. I need to fix what they are showing in their results and to do this I need to lay down various solutions. Over the next couple of days I’ll be making a number of changes behind the scenes to help fix the mess and it’s these changes that I plan to share. We can at least learn how disatrous it can actually be by deleting everything.
Update
Would you believe I need to update this post, even before I’ve published it? I’ve started making changes approximately two hours ago, I had 141 URL’s indexed I now have 135, is Google really that fast? I’ll try to answer this in a future post. 
Entry Filed under: Google
10 Comments Add your own
1. Keiron | November 26th, 2007 at 8:47 am
I actually deleted my whole blog on purpose a couple of years back!
I’d been using b2evo and it was spammed to bits, getting hundreds of spam trackbacks etc without any of the protection that Wordpress offers you - it was time for a change.
I changed to Wordpress, installed to a different folder and had a completely different permalink structure.
I still get hits for the old blog even now, it’s been gone for years! Not from Google though - from thousands of other robots, that I suspect weren’t around at the time of my previous blog!
2. Jason Roe | November 26th, 2007 at 11:26 am
Create a heap of categories, create some fluffy content and get your 301’s in place. It’s just plain lazy to let your blog go bombastic like this.
3. Gavin | November 26th, 2007 at 1:13 pm
Keiron thanks for dropping by. Its going to be interesting to see how long the traffic keeps up for the old urls although I’m suspecting its not going to be for long.
Hey Jason. Lazy you say? 5 hours of configuring, testing and reconfiguring is lazy? I personally believe the 301 route is the lazy mans method.
4. Jason Roe | November 26th, 2007 at 4:29 pm
I see.. smile and nod…
5. Keiron | November 26th, 2007 at 5:31 pm
Google won’t do it for long - but some of the other engines, years!!!
6. Gavin | November 26th, 2007 at 6:12 pm
I’ll be honest Keiron and say that I’m better known for only chasing Google. I’m guessing Yahoo is going to takes its time.
7. Matt | December 3rd, 2007 at 7:29 pm
Glad to hear that they are indexing your site very fast this time around…I think it’s a good thing as well that they come back to check if a page exists after it was taken off…perhaps temporarily. Best of luck and don’t sit back and watch the show too much
8. Paul | December 16th, 2007 at 6:37 pm
Hi Gavin, google indexes more or less at the same frequency that you post. If your a frequent poster you prob stand more of chances of getting those URLS removed. Have you looked into Google webmaster tools?
9. Gavin | December 16th, 2007 at 11:26 pm
Hi Paul, I’ve been playing around with Google Webmaster Tools since deleting the content.
Once I get more free time I’ll try and make some posts about what I’ve seen.
10. Rif Chia | January 1st, 2008 at 4:43 pm
You can actually submit a updated sitemap of your current blog through webmaster’s tools. Google will reindex your websites accordingly to the new sitemap submitted. Problem solved.
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