This site does not exist
I have been running this little site for some time.
It gets very few hits, but it never occurred to me to investigate the reason. In the grand scheme of things, I supposed that people just weren’t interested in some rather boring musings or little technical gems that I had picked up along the way.
The other day, I did a check to see what keywords people were using to find the site. I ran off a list for the last year.
It was empty.
No search engines are seeing the site.
The site is search engine friendly in that it has all the recommended robots.txt and other files. I have a plugin (Google XML Sitemaps) that generates the required sitemap files for search engines. I also have the ‘All in one SEO pack’ installed. All in all, it should provide a feeding frenzy for searches.
I went into my Google account to see if I could find any error messages.
There are a few errors, including a complaint that ‘robots.txt’ is unreachable, which it isn’t. It also complains that my ‘sitemap.xml‘ file is an HTML file, which it isn’t.
According to the stats page, the site has been crawled, on an average of 11 times per day so Google is aware of it’s existence, yet if I do a search for ‘the other fellow’ there is no sign of the site (when it should be near or at the top of the results?).
I am baffled.
Anyone any ideas?
Your comment was a bit too short. Please go back and try again.
Maybe this is why.
Heh! That is an old problem. I don’t know what the minimum is but it’s around the three or four characters? Anyway, I doubt that would piss Google off enough that they wouldn’t crawl the site?
interesting. and if you ask google what’s linking to this site, only two turn up – Maxicane and a reference in the source of an Ebay item.
http://www.google.ie/search?q=link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.apipeandakeyboard.com%2F
no idea why google wouldn’t pick up on this. the robots.txt is OK, there is at least one link to it, you say it is being crawled.
Hmm… interesting.
check the Privacy Settings in the wordpress admin. there’s a setting there for turning search-engine accessibility on/off
Anything to do with the redirect from https://www.apipeandakeyboard.com to apipeandakeyboard.com ?
Are both sub-domains registered with Google?
Tom
Tom: That isn’t the problem. Both this site and Head Rambles are set up on the same server with identical server configuration. I can assure you that the other site has no problems whatsoever!!
Kae: That is very, very strange for a couple of reasons. For one thing, I know of a few sites that link here apart from Maxi’s, so why is his the only one showing? For another, that eBay site has no link anywhere back to here (and I hope you don’t think that site has anything to do with me, BTW? 😉 ). I checked through their source code, but no links. I have never seen that site before (thank God!!)
I checked your suggestion in the settings and it is set to the default – accessability is set to ON.
No pagrank, no Google – sandboxed?
Alexa 339k – someone’s having a look!
Yahoo seems to like you though 🙂
Odd!
Interesting that davidmcwilliams.ie has an Alexa ranking of 326,000 while this site is only 13,000 behind at 339,000. Three possible conclusions: lots of people are visiting here without being picked up by your stats; McWilliams’ site is getting no traffic, or Alexa is bonkers.
Mick: Welcome to this obscure corner of the Web! As far as Google is concerned, this site does not exist (as my post tile says!). I can’t see why it should be sandboxed, as according to my Google account, the site is there, verified and all the rest but just not indexed. They give no errors apart from the ones I mentiones (the Sitemap problem) but that’s it. Very odd.
Ian: I can assure you that this site has very low traffic indeed. I have no idea why the Alexa ranking is so high, so all I can assume is that Alexa is bonkers!
Tom: This is going from strange to surreal! I have no idea why that cached page is there, unless the domain was registered by someone else in the past. However, I went into Wayback, and they have no record of the domain at all.
I’m begining to toy with the idea of renaming the site and going with a new domain. I never liked the current name anyway…..
If you search under Yahoo for “the other fellow” your site comes up, but with no details. If you click on the associated cache it links to a dodgy looking malware site?
http://uk.search.yahoo.com/search?rd=r1&p=the+other+fellow&toggle=1&cop=mss&ei=UTF-8&fr=yfp-t-710
when you say that the site is crawled 11 times per day – do the stats show what pages are being read?
No. It just gives a graph for the last 90 days and gives bland figures – Pages crawled per day: High 34, Low 1, Average 11.
One thing that is strange is the only error message – It complains that it can’t find “robots.txt”, but it says it is looking in “/2009/01/03/it-is-out/”. Maybe for some strange reason, it is taking this directory as being the root of the site?
LATEST NEWS:
I used Google’s tool to view the site as a crawler and got the following –
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved PermanentlyDate: Wed, 24 Feb 2010 16:36:11 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.52 (Red Hat) FrontPage/5.0.2.2635
Location: http://doormoney.us/
Content-Length: 338
Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=100
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Moved Permanently
The document has moved here.
Apache/2.0.52 (Red Hat) FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 Server at www.apipeandakeyboard.com Port 80
It looks like I may have found the problem.
The fucking site was hacked and the .htaccess compromised.
WHOIS!…
Domain Name: DOORMONEY.US
Domain ID: D10091504-US
Sponsoring Registrar: DIRECTI INTERNET SOLUTIONS PVT. LTD. D/B/A PUBLICDOMAINREGISTRY.COM
Registrar URL (registration services): http://www.publicdomainregistry.com
Domain Status: ok
Registrant ID: DI_1335546
Registrant Name: Maximilian Berkovich
Registrant Organization: Rasta Community
Registrant Address1: Ann Karelina street 123
Registrant City: DeepTown
Registrant Postal Code: 34543534
Registrant Country: Ethiopia
Registrant Country Code: ET
Registrant Phone Number: +21.43534532
Plane ticket!?
🙂
Maximilian Berkovich is dead meat. I’m handing his details to Grandad, and I don’t give a shit if he is a Rastafarian or even an Ethopian!!!
what a clever little hack!
Most of the hacks I’ve had to clean up range from obvious datacentre-thrashing network-hogging bots, to unobtrusive spam links embedded in blog articles or even in HTML files.
This one is /smart/ though! very very nice.
In a nasty bastarding kind of way, of course.
It was clever all right – the addition of a couple of lines of code that only applied to Googlebots, so I never noticed.
It must have been hacked around the turn of the year, as the last search to reach here was on the 30th December. Now I have a feeling this site has been blacklisted, so I have had to lodge an appeal. That could take ages to resolve.
give it a week. it could be that google took you from their listings because of the 301. when they see it’s gone, they should start relisting you
I’m not that worried, now that I have found the cause. Anway, I have plenty to occupy myself – am busy trying to hack doormoney.us.
😈