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This Is Odd

By - August 20, 2004

I very much doubt this was intentional…at least, I hope it was not, but it seems Feedster and Blinx have been taken out of Google’s results in one way or another. Read up on it here and here….

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  • http://inlogicalbearer.blogspot.com Eric Baillargeon

    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

  • ID:entity

    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

  • http://trainedmonkey.com/ jim winstead

    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.

  • http:/www.igniq.com/robs_blog/ Rob

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

  • http://www.antisocial.me.uk mos

    collateral damage? :)

  • http://www.google.com/webmasters/ GoogleGuy

    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 http://www.feedster.com... done.
    Connecting to http://www.feedster.com66.151.189.204:80... 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 http://www.feedster.com... done.
    Connecting to http://www.feedster.com66.151.189.204:80... 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..

  • http://www.feedster.com Scott Rafer

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