I
have a mystery to solve. Up until last August, this blog was averaging
about 450 hits per day, of which about 20-25% came from Google. But
then suddenly, Google stopped crawling How to Save the World,
except for a very few pages and some of my Stories posts. Since then,
while my daily hits have risen to about 700 hits per day, the
percentage from Google has steadily dropped, and now account for only
5-10% of my traffic. And virtually all of these diminished number of hits point to posts before last August.
In addiiton to costing me a couple of hundred serendipitous visits per
day, the lack of Google indexing is aggravating for those looking for
things in my archives. And the search bar in my right sidebar is only
catching pre-September posts. Besides, lots of other search tools are
also powered by Google.
Here's a couple of examples. I've written two posts on parrots. One was on Alex, the gray parrot, on Nov.12/03, and the second was N'kisi, the gray parrot, on Feb.1/04. If you Google "grey parrot" you'll come up empty, at least as far as references to my blog are concerned.
A second example: I've written two articles about the work of Hendrik
Hertzberg: One on Liberal Radio on Aug.9/03 and the second on Unstead
State on Jan.31/04. Google search returns the first of these -- pre
Sept.03, but not the second.
The irony is that the Google results include other bloggers' references to my newer post on Hertzberg, but not my post.
Aalia Wayfare, who fixed my problem with the gap in the middle column
of my permalinks, suggested I add some metatags in my home page, which
I've done. It hasn't helped:
And Robert Scoble says it's illogical that someone with 350 inbound blogs isn't getting spidered by Google.
So what's the answer? Is Google deliberately omitting How to Save the World hits because I'm so prolific and perhaps drawing traffic away from other sources -- was I too
successful in getting Google traffic and hence "cut off"? Or this there
a more innocent, technical explanation. I offer a modest reward, plus
deepest thanks and publicity for your brilliance, to the first person
who can solve the mystery.
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
I
have a mystery to solve. Up until last August, this blog was averaging
about 450 hits per day, of which about 20-25% came from Google. But
then suddenly, Google stopped crawling 
