@ Matt – No according to GWMT the page is there with all my internal links showing up so that’s not the issue I’m afraid. Thanks for the comment – hope you stick around (hint) my next post is a cracker!

I have seen this same issue with one of our sites – very recently.

Quick question – in Google Webmaster Tools (GWT), does the main page for your blog – http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/seo-blog/ – appear in list of pages with INTERNAL links?

We have a site that exhibiting the behaviour you mention – blog results not showing up instantly in Google but its still getting crawled every couple of days etc. But interestingly, the root for the blog is not in the list of internal pages – despite there being many links to this page. Other individual blog posts that are cross referenced/deep linked are in the list – just not the root page.

Matt

Here is an example of Google being VERY slow in updating itself:

A site (home page) disappeared on the SERP’s 12 Feb due to other sites copying it. We changed the content and Google recached 15th Feb. 19 Feb the snippet showed the update, but the cache still showed the old version. Now 20 Feb, and the Google cache correctly shows the updated version, but when I search for unique text on the page, the site still does not show. The top SERP’s have not yet come back.

A month ago when the same thing happened, the site was recached the next day, and back in the top SERP’s later that day.

VERY slow at the moment.

And as an aside – what is your experience with scraper sites copying content and destroying results. Do you have a post on this – so this post does not get totally off topic

New posts are included the regular index almost instantly (no cache though) but not blog search (they were previously). It’s at the point now where I have around 5 posts on different blogs referring to my post that appear in blog search (for “post title”), but my original post doesn’t appear.

A blog search for “fusednation” returns no results, although “fused nation” does – but no pages from the site just the URL as a related blog. It even shows a single reference on a comment on DaveNs blog but no pages from my blog.

I’m not certain that authority / PageRank is related to the issue though – there are blogs with lower (TB) PR and have been around less time show up refering to my posts.

Offhand it seems that the site is simply removed from Blog Search results (but still returns as a result for a site name search).

No obvious reasons why – the site has a reasonable amount of links – new posts regular get linked to from other blogs – content is unique, etc.

No issues in Google sitemaps – a reasonable amount of Google feed subscribers, no content issues, variety of IBL text, sitemap downloaded regularly (and recently rebuilt it due to new design). Plus the site has had over 15,000 visitors already this month (but only a small percentage from organic referrals).

The only thought I’ve had is that the sitemap generator plugin produces an error trying to ping Google (when new posts are posted or old ones are edited). I don’t see how this would result in the blog being removed from blog search though – perhaps only affect new pages being included. Given that new content can be live in regular search within minutes, I’m assuming the ping works though.

Seems to be a new thing – only really noticed it since I changed the WP version to include G Blog incoming links instead of technorati. Can’t remember when that change was made, but within the past few months I think?

Scott

Of course, it might not be a penalty at all but it sure feels like it. I’m double checking all I can at this end – it’s quite time consuming. I’m updating my version of Wordpress and my plugins first.

Obviously this is just a random conclusion I have came to, however just because Google isn’t indexing your website does not mean its a G problem, its probably more than likely a algorithm change and you shouldn’t focus on why it has happened, but more so how to get around the problem

Why would I need to add a xml sitemap? Up until a couple of weeks ago everything was rosy…. I shouldn’t need to change anything if nothing’s changed in the back end of this blog or at the Big G’s end….

I would recommend that your next step is to add a sitemaps, and see if that helps

It doesn’t change the fact something’s changed as I don’t really tamper about ‘back there’ so to speak.

In my blogsearch exploration yesterday I saw a huge difference between what Google Blogsearch and Technorati were listing, though it didn’t seem quality related.

We’re not likely to see search engine land or SERoundtable suffer either. I’m taking about the smaller seo blogs of which there are plenty.

I don’t have a xml sitemap on this site – never needed one.

@ Sebastian sorry to hear keep an eye on it over the next few days

Try a different test, this time make a new blog, on http://www.blogspot.com and do some ping’s and gauge the success you have there. Then make a Digg post, and gauge the success there, i’m 90% sure what you are seeing is an anomaly and you should definitely see what you expect to see.

As a quick question, you are pinging this post to the common places right? And you do have a sitemap, with which you pinged the major search engines to tell them that you have made an update? You can’t just expect them to check your website all the time, it is very dependant on when the last crawl was! Crawl cycle average is 0.5 days between crawls even for the largest/authoritive of websites like engadget.com (source: seometer.com). If you ping your sitemaps i would assume a MUCH quicker discovery of your URL in the serps.