I’m not sure why I sense some bitterness in your comment – perhaps connected to your comment on the ‘Ireland.com search is broken’ thread?

The post in question was removed from ALL data centers.

Thankfully I haven’t been hacked (yet).

I’d almost think you worked for Google. Except I think maybe it’s more likely you have some connection to ireland.com.

Thanks for your comments.

It’s not as if Google has a single server providing results. They have multiple data centers, and it’s just a matter of them not being in sync. Data center A has page, Data center B doesn’t. User A connects to DC A, user B connects to DC B. User B is paranoid and has to blog about it.

Additionally, there’s the fact that Google crawls sites periodically. Perhaps upon re-indexing the site it wasn’t able to validate the page’s existence, but later it was found.

Also, As mentioned on Matt Cutt’s blog in the past, if Google finds that your site [was hacked and] has malicious content index, they’ll attempt to notify the web master and de-index the site to prevent users from being attacked.

Furthermore, Google shows different pages to users in different geographical locations. (There was a post regarding that on digg several weeks ago.)

Some paranoia is justified. Some is just ignorance and stupidity.

P.S.
Google’s search is a free service. Unless you’re paying for advertising on the site, they are not obliged to list you. If you don’t like their practices, don’t use it.

Thanks for dropping by.

As you probably know, I am very aware from the Group (I’m Red Cardinal over there) that you cannot comment on many of the Google-specific issues that arise. I understand this.

But when this issue occurs twice and in relation to the same subject matter I have cause to be concerned that something other than coincidence is at play.

I am left gasping completely bewildered as to how any technical or algorithmic effect could possibly de-index this page. But when this same issue affects two pages on completely unrelated blogs I am left somewhat incredulous.

I suppose it serves me right for playing with Google so much

Thanks for your comment Adam

Rgds

Richard

PS my My sister-in-law’s cousin’s friend’s postman has a prob…

Just wanted to chime in again and note that I’m not aware of any relationship between Google and ThinkPR, but… if such a relationship existed, it would make no difference in the context of search quality issues.

Our Search Quality department is delightfully independent from partnership and advertising concerns, and I’m confident that will remain the case. We’ve not hesitated to remove sites from the index even when those companies are high-spending advertisers, for instance.

I realize you’d also like to read an answer giving detailed explanations for the status of specific pages, but that’s not something I’m going to engage in here or elsewhere on the net. That, as you can imagine, isn’t scalable (“Could you comment on these pages? Those pages? My friend’s aunt’s gardener’s pages?…”)

Lastly, I’ll just reiterate that there are (and have been) no editorially-based decisions at play in this situation.

Regards,
Adam

Strangely it mentions blocking IPs – “This reason means the IP address was previously identified and is being temporarily blocked, and another entry will have the real reason for the block.”

Not 100% sure how to interpret that?

I wonder do eircom bastardise the requests going through their dial-up proxy?

Rgds

Bad Behavior doesn’t do anything with IPs. It only analyses user agents. See:

http://error.wordpress.com/2005/09/30/what-to-do-when-bad-behavior-blocks-you-or-your-friends/

I noticed that a while back when I had to use dial-up recently. It appears that Bad Behaviour has blacklisted large blocks of eircoms IP pool. (Michele might know if there’s a valid reason for this.)

I might flick it off and see how much extra spam I get.

Rgds

Richard

The problem with the yo-yo theory is that the page in question was indexed and ranked. Now it simply isn’t indexed any more.

If it were a honeymoon, as Dave suggested in the comments of the post, then the post would simply drop in the rankings. The page would not be de-indexed though.

The main page was around #32 for the phrase. But the post in question was #3. There is zero dupe content as I use custom snippets on my homepage.

I sometimes revise the content of a post, but never the URL (well very rarely and always with a 301).

I’m quite probably seeing things that just aren’t there, but I cant help but feel it’s a one-in-a-million coincidence.

Your linkbacks both in and out seem to be fine (compared to other posts).

I had to redo the link/index structure of my blog to remove a lot of dupe content. A prime example is content getting duplicated in categories. I have set my blog up to no-cache, follow these kinds of pages. The only things that are cached are the posts or pages.

http://www.jason-roe.com/blog/search-results-experiment-serps-rankings/

My guess is the page will show up cached and ranking within 3-4 weeks.

Of course what the response will be…..