John Battelle's Searchblog

I got no problem with Blinkx and Feedster is first out here in canada for their subdomain but I post a similar story on Icerocket who was launch 18 days ago and when Google News got more than 50 link on it since 2 weeks ?
Here the post :
http://inlogicalbearer.blogspot.com/2004/08/google-take-is-time-to-indexing.html

The only page a can get to come up in the SERPS is a Feedster tutorial on BLOGGER, I'm not actually sure if this does / doesn't fuel any potential conspiracy theories?

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&q=%22A+Tutorial+from+the+Folks+at+Feedster%22

Here is the page from Google's cache, this was my first port of call to attempt to find feedster.com

http://66.102.11.104/search?q=cache:Xw_rAMqAXAEJ:feedster.com/tutorials/bloggerbasics/+%22A+Tutorial+from+the+Folks+at+Feedster%22&hl=en

I can't believe it’s intentional, although they might have used the cover of the last 24 hrs to slip in a Algo update, of which we could be seeing a knock on effect.

here's a theory: the search-engine spammers that have been trying to game some of the blogging-related directories and sites may have gotten sites like feedster caught up in google's anti-link-farm machinery.

The links go some way to explore why Feedster is missing from the results, but what's the story with blinkx?

collateral damage? :)

Hey, I happened to be at working late tonight, so let me see if I can take a stab at it. The query [blinkx] returns Blinkx at #1, and [site:blinkx.com] returns 250+ results, so that's good. I'm guessing that John is wondering why the url query [www.blinkx.com] doesn't return their root page. At first glance I'd guess it's because Blinkx has a zero second meta refresh. If you wget http://www.blinkx.com/ you get basically an empty page with this redirect:
meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL=http://www.blinkx.com/overview_us.php"
I'll ask a crawl person to check on it, though.

The Feedster case is a little easier: it appears that Feedster is serving different content depending on the user agent. A normal user gets normal content, but when the user-agent contains "Googlebot/2.1," Feedster serves up a 404. I verified this from the Googleplex and from my school account, but you can try it for yourself as well:

# Fetch as a normal user
% wget http://www.feedster.com/
--21:39:51-- http://www.feedster.com/
=> `index.html.8'
Resolving www.feedster.com... done.
Connecting to www.feedster.com[66.151.189.204]:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: unspecified [text/html]

[ ] 6,266 75.54K/s

21:39:51 (75.54 KB/s) - `index.html.8' saved [6266]

# Now fetch with a Googlebot-like user agent
% wget -U Googlebot/2.1 http://www.feedster.com/
--21:40:02-- http://www.feedster.com/
=> `index.html.9'
Resolving www.feedster.com... done.
Connecting to www.feedster.com[66.151.189.204]:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 404 Not Found
21:40:02 ERROR 404: Not Found.

Given that the issues appears to be on Feedster's side in this case, if they'll start serving Google a normal page again instead of a 404, I would expect their root page to be back right as rain in a few days. Okay, back to work for me..

Thank you! We'll give your solution a shot and see if we get re-included.