Xerratus
Happily stressed out, since 1974


 
Monday, October 10, 2005
<< The birth of a new domain
Case dismissed! >>

I've owned the xerratus domain for a couple years now.  Prior to being my blog, it was the site that hosted our family’s pictures.  Google, doing just what they do, scanned my site and listed it's contents sometime back, no big deal.  A few weeks back, I decide to move the family’s pictures to a less public domain and use xerratus as my blog site.  All was going smoothly until I tried to remove the old content.

First, when I did a search for xerratus I got the blog home page -perfect!  Underneath were the family picture directories and I wanted them gone -expected results.  After a perusing Google for a few minutes I found that you can submit pages and/or directories to them for removal as long as they return a 404 error.  I can do this as the current site doesn't use any of the old directory structure.  Roughly a week later I get an automated email from Google stating that they removed my urls.  Sweet!  On top of that I read about the robot.txt file that you can place in the root directory to tell spiders/bots what to scan and what not to scan.  I add this, just as a precaution.

The day I get the email I search Google for xerratus again and voila, it's only grabbing the new blog content.  Google did its job perfectly, so why do you ask is Google today’s Dumbass?  Simple.  Today, I did a search for xerratus (don't ask why) and every piece of my old site is back up again and my blog is nowhere to be found!  WTF!  Do I have to submit the urls again?  Is the robot.txt file just a false security blanket to make people think that Google isn't trying its hand at world dominance?  

Fuckers!  

At least Microsoft's search has it right!

UPDATE: Well, I checked today and all seems to be back to normal.  One directory from my old site is still listed but I'm sure it'll be delisted in a few.