orlady - 3:16 pm on Jun 12, 2004 (gmt 0)

I think I have been having a similar experience to moocow's. It hasn't been going on as long, but I have the frustrating feeling that Google is ignoring my site.

I am no web professional, but I've had occasion to help tell the world about a few websites. In the past, when I submitted a URL to Google, it appeared in the index after a couple of days at most.

Now I have a new site, on its own newly purchased .org domain, that I'd like people to be able to find using a search engine. I don't care about the page rank -- I just want it to be in the index for people who are looking for it specifically.

I submitted the URL to Google a couple of weeks ago. There are two publicly visible links to it: one from a PR6 site (although the new page linking to it is still just PR0) and one from a PR4 page on a site that is PR9. Although I assume some of my site visitors have done the same, I have visited the site from MSIE a couple of times (from different IPs) with the Google tracking feature on, in hopes of luring Googlebot.

Googlebot finally visited the site a few hours ago, looked only at the index page, and left.

I'm hoping Googlebot will be back, and that at least the site will show up in the index. However, I'm puzzled that it took "him" so long to get here, and I am wondering if there is some reason why he's been avoiding this site.

One concern I have is that the domain apparently was registered to someone else once (according to the data at a whois site), but before I registered it I found no shadows of the old site anywhere on the web (no links to it, no cached version on archive.org). Is Google possibly penalizing the domain?