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Q: google indexing ( Answered,   6 Comments )
Question  
Subject: google indexing
Category: Computers > Algorithms
Asked by: londonlinks-ga
List Price: $4.00
Posted: 01 May 2002 08:25 PDT
Expires: 08 May 2002 08:25 PDT
Question ID: 8147
For some reason the url www.ugvendors.com/register.htm shows up on the
first page of google when searching for "queen mother".

The link is dead, but on furher investigtion if one looks at the
cached page for www.queenmother.org it says www.ugvendors.com is the
cached page, although www.ugvendors.com is not connected with
www.queenmother.org in any way and never has been. Thr url
www.ugvendors.com seems to have replaced the url for
www.queenmother.org and this could only be because queenmother.org
moved it's hosting to another server and during the DNS update, google
has accidentally gone to www.queenmother.org and found a new website
at that old ip address.

Can the current correct page for the google cache of
www.queenmother.org be shown?
Answer  
Subject: Re: google indexing
Answered By: janina-ga on 01 May 2002 13:22 PDT
 
Google updates its index regularly, so updated or outdated link
submissions are not necessary. Most likely, Google will update this
during its next crawl.
Comments  
Subject: Re: google indexing
From: jesseruderman-ga on 02 May 2002 03:38 PDT
 
At ://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=www.queenmother.org, the
actual web page link points to http://www.ugvendors.com/Register.htm. 
The backlink  and cache links are both for
http://www.ugvendors.com/Register.htm but the "pages that contain the
term" link uses www.queenmother.org.

http://www.ugvendors.com/register.htm exists but Register.htm does
not.

The two don't seem to be hosted at the same site: www.queenmother.org
is 204.188.156.77, a dedicated ip address hosted by www.infoquest.com
(searched by ip address at arin.net).  www.ugvendors.com is hosted by
www.godaddy.com.

A Google search for link:www.ugvendors.com/register.htm doesn't turn
up much.  A search for link:www.ugvendors.com/Register.htm includes
several sites that link to www.queenmother.org but also a lot of sites
that don't seem to link to ugvendors.com *or* queenmother.org.

You've got me stumped :)
Subject: Re: google indexing
From: jesseruderman-ga on 02 May 2002 04:13 PDT
 
queenmother.org is *registered* through GoDaddy:
http://www.firevision.co.uk/cgi-bin/whois.pl?domain=queenmother&tld=.org
.  GoDaddy is both the host and the registrar for ugvendors.com.  It's
possible that after queenmother.org was registered but before any
pages were created for it (and before infoquest hosted it),
queenmother.org redirected to http://63.241.136.201/index.html,
GoDaddy's page-not-found page.

I thought that maybe Google was treating all links redirecting to
http://63.241.136.201/index.html as links to Register.htm, but many
sites listed as linking to Register.htm don't seem to link to anything
that redirects to http://63.241.136.201/index.html.  (I used a "linked
pages" bookmarklet to check all the links from several pages that
Google listed as linking to Register.htm, crashing my computer once in
the process.. doh!)

So I found a connection between ugvendors and queenmother.  Google
confuses queenmother with a url on ugvendors that redirects to
GoDaddy's 404 page, but I don't know why Google is confused.
Subject: Re: google indexing
From: jesseruderman-ga on 02 May 2002 04:48 PDT
 
Several of the sites listed on a search for
http://www.ugvendors.com/Register.htm link to www.webgator.com, which
redirects to http://www.commercialcreditor.com/, which is a GoDaddy
site.  However, commercialcreditor is not a 404 (at least not today). 
Interesting side note:
://www.google.com/search?btnG=&q=commercialcreditor.com links to
webgator.com rather than commercialcreditor.com.

Reading the GoDaddy page-not-found page again, I noticed this:

"This page may not exist due to the following reasons:
1. You are the owner of this web site and you have not uploaded   
<-----
2. The URL that you have entered in your browser is incorrect.
3. The Link that you clicked on incorrectly points to this page."

So it's not just possible, but likely that the url www.queenmother.com
once redirected to that error page.

I think this all boils down to:

Google assumes that redirects are permanent, which is a dangerous
assumption if you're a search engine.  Google assumes that redirects
are permanent even if the redirected-to page is conceptually* a
page-not-found page, and even if the redirecting URL suddenly has
twice as many external pages linking to it than it did before.  When
deciding which URL to list as the "real" URL when redirection occurs,
Google picks a page at random from the sites that redirect, rather
than taking the redirected-to site as the "real" one.

* http://63.241.136.201/index.html does NOT claim to be a 404 page
like it should.  Instead, it sends "200 OK" when requested, making it
seem to search engines and browsers like an ordinary page. 
http://webtools.mozilla.org/web-sniffer/view.cgi?url=http%3A//63.241.136.201/index.html
Subject: Re: google indexing
From: londonlinks-ga on 03 May 2002 10:21 PDT
 
Hi - the reason why google shows a page not found in the seventh
postion on its results page for "queen mother" is that
www.queenmother.org used to be in that position a few weeks ago.

This means that Google must have initially spidered the page
correctly, because it was indexed in the results, but then
www.queenmother.org moved from its hosting company godaddy to
infoquest and during this update of DNS entries, google somehow cached
the "page not found" at www.queenmother.org, since this domain was
still being resolved to the old ip address on godaddy's server, which
by then had been allocated to another company.
Subject: Re: google indexing
From: smile-ga on 22 May 2002 06:11 PDT
 
The page http://www.queenmother.org/ works now.
Subject: Re: google indexing
From: almir_kazazic-ga on 08 Jul 2002 07:30 PDT
 
there was a similar problem with IP adresses , after we changed our
provider as KPN-Qwest went bankrupt , we got new ip adresses because
of that we was not wisited from google-bot for weeks,  because google
obviously cache IP with dns names, does anyone knows how often are
this IP adresses updated and is ther a way of comunicating this to
google

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