We’re still trying to figure out why our Google traffic is off by about 50% in the last two months. Algorythm shift? Google bug? Sun spots? And while I’ve been digging around I’ve found some seriously weird shit in our Google site index. For example, here’s a screen grab of page 25 of their index. Check out the text that Google has supposedly harvested from my wife’s blog catagory [Peggy C, The Other Half » geeky stuff]:

Yesterday it was a bunch of my blog posts that had the same sort of erroneous porny-spammy text scrapes in Google’s index of our site. Today they’re (as far as I’ve looked) gone, but now Google snap-shot of my wife’s blog is poisoned. Where’s Google getting this stuff from? It’s certainly not anything I wrote, or Peggy wrote?

The scrapes on bunch of other posts on my blog simply have the menu bar alt-text instead of the actual post content. I’m sure the page-rank for those posts has fallen through the floor. Oh well.

Normally December is our biggest month of the year, but this December it’s just average. Fortunately since our last Google debacle we’ve developed other avenues of getting our work to market, so we can absorb the hit. But no doubt that are other web-based merchants out there for whom this isn’t going to be a very merry Christmas.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 17th, 2007 at 7:21 pm and is filed under google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.