Friday, January 13, 2012

Google Searches

How does Google's search function work?

If you read our food blog (not sure anyone does regularly), you might have noticed that we changed the name from berry berry delicious to panda bytes. The old name just wasn't fitting us and we are much happier with the new name. However, we are quite puzzled as to why all the posts don't show up in Google searches. Most of the old traffic came from people looking for particular things (mostly related to Amsterdam) and, until this morning, none of those individual posts could be found by searching.

I have been testing it by searching different words and limiting the search to the address of our blog. By doing that, I determined that, through last night, the only individual posts that came up were published between midday on November 21, 2011 and the time we changed the name of the blog. Anything posted after we changed the name didn't come up yet but I don't know how long it takes for things to be picked up by a search engine. Any links to old posts that were included in that timeframe also came up. (That took some time to figure out. I was wondering why some random posts from the spring worked but nothing else did.) Anything before midday on November 21 (or maybe just end of the day November 20 Pacific time) only came up with the page for the entire month. Seemed like a strange cut-off as we didn't change the name of the blog on the 20th/21st of the month.

This morning, I was pleasantly surprised to see that more individual posts are now searchable. I haven't been able to figure out how those particular posts came up, as there are non-linked posts from August that are up but others from October are not. It's a bit strange. Maybe it depends which ones have been viewed recently? Maybe it will just take time until they are all accessible again. Does anyone know? I use this to remember what I've written about, so it's a useful tool I'd like to have back.

And does anyone know how long it takes for our old blog to start appearing? Going to the link says it's been removed but it's still high up in the search results for a couple of topics. I wish I knew more about how this works!

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