Mystery of Google index drop solved?

Update. Corrected Christian's surname. Sorry, man.

A while ago I complained that uche.ogbuji.net disppeared from Google search results soon after I went to a CherryPy-based server. I'm up to say that I'm a goof, but I hope that admitting my silly error might save someone else some head-scratching (maybe even this gentleman)

I'm at least not alone in my error. The clue came from this message by the very smart Christian Wyglendowski In my case I was getting 404s for most things, but I did have a bug that was causing a 500 error on requests to robots.txt. Apparently the Google bot shuns sites with that problem. I can understand that but it's interesting that Yahoo doesn't seem to do the same thing, since my ranking didn't drop much there. I fixed the bug and then submitted a reinclusion request to Google following the suggestions in this article (I guess SEO advice isn't a completely parasitic endeavor). The body of my message was as follows:

I had a bug causing 500 error on robots.txt request, and I think that's why I got dropped from your index. I've fixed that bug, and would like to request reinclusion to your index. Thanks.

We'll see if that does the trick.

[Uche Ogbuji]

via Copia
2 responses
Glad that you have your Google situation squared away.  I was glad to get mine taken care of!  I also noticed that most other crawlers didn't care if a GET for robots.txt returned a 500. 



On a side note, it seems like your blog software is still truncating my last name ;-)
Sorry, Christian.  Fixed the entry.