Google paying less interest to "weblogs"?

Previously cached every 2 days, a blog has now disappeared completely...

[andersja]

Google / SEO experts,

My weblog (URL listed in my profile) was previously PR ~6 and reindexed / cached by Google approx every 2 days. Google gave me many referrals based on various, current search terms based on topics described in my blog.

All of a sudden, the last couple of weeks the Toolbar lists PR0 for my site, despite it being updated with relevant (in a weblogger's context) content more or less daily, and having a 99-something% uptime (unlikely that Google encountered a server down). Daypop (www.daypop.com) and Blogdex (blogdex.media.mit.edu) still indexes the site daily and provides referrals/hits based on the content.

I believe I haven't engaged in any spamming, nor have I used any automated tools like the ones decribed in this thread: [webmasterworld.com...]

The only change I believe can have triggered the PR-change is that I went through a lot of old, expired pages and added a "andersja has moved, please see [URL] or check out andersja's weblog" on the top or bottom of all those pages...

My layout is pure "Google-friendly" HTML, other, relevant blogs link to my site and so on...

What I'd like to ask you guys is - do I do something wrong, or has Google changed it's policy towards weblogs?

Thanks!

[danny]

I've noticed at least one other prominent blog with what looks like a PR penalty - PR3 (when I'd expect 6 or 7) on the home page and 0 internally.

[conor]

It sure looks like a penalty ... youre weather pages are still PR6 but the rest of the site is PRO. Might be a toolbar PR glitch but I doubt it.

[andersja]

Is there any way to check whether this is a penalty or not (and what caused it) so I can rectify the situation?

(Site also no longer appears in Google in searches for the obvious keyword "andersja" or "andersja's blog" which a short while ago listed it on top. It is also not cached...)

Additional FYI; on all old/unused/non-primary accounts I have online, I have created a similar page:
http://www.ludvig.no/~andersja/
http://www.stud.fim.ntnu.no/~andersja/
etc... Does this consitute spam?

(it's easy enough to remove; I just added it by default for completeness and "backward compatible-ness" to old sites I have maintained etc)

[Brett_Tabke]

Positive that the pr _did_ change? Did your referral numbers drop or switch?

There have been some fluctuations in pr recently.

I've noticed a few sites with unexplained seeminly pr0's. I was just at zdnet and ran into quite a few. Aside from my initial joy, I quickly sumised that it was just a toolbar glitch thing.

[andersja]

It seems pretty affirmative that the site accidentally or consciously has been dropped from Google alltogether - it used to be cached and isn't anymore; it used to give me many referrals from searches on relevant keywords - now it doesn't appear in searches at all (I don't mean that it appears further down -- it really doesn't appear at all). All advice appreciated... Thanks!

[yobb]

Andersja,

did google crawl the whole weblog every 2 days, including the archive ?

How did the last crawl look like and what are the dates of last crawl and the dropping from the db ?

[andersja]

yobb,

only the front page was crawled with this frequency. I didn't validate the logs, but since the page has big dates written on it, it was simple to stop by and see the latest cache Google had of the page from time to time. This was updated once every few days, and new articles I had written were getting referrals from Google almost right away (when I wrote about "hot" topics, for exmaple "blogchalk" -- for more than a day, searching for "blogchalk netherlands" or "blogchalk norway" resulted in only my page at Google (while it gave more results at more freshly updated www.daypop.com).

The archives - not changing once the week is finished - were indexed, but I cannot imagine they were re-crawled with such a frequency...

[Brett_Tabke]

Looking pretty close at it, I think it's just been dropped from the index. It's not a penalty. Google is showing zero backlinks (I don't trust that display though), but that's probably why it got weeded. It should reappear in the next index. It's not uncommon.

[andersja]

Thanks for your help, Brett... I hope you're right. We'll see (shortly, I presume... looks like everybody's waiting for the index-updates... :) )

[andersja]

Just an update on this, as the Google update is in progress: my site now shows up in the Google Directory (they obviously downloaded a new update from dmoz)

[directory.google.com...]

Also, searching on www2.google.com and www3.google.com gives hits, so at least the site is not completely out of the game for now.

We should keep an eye open for changes in Page Rank for weblogs though, since also other people mentioned they had seen blogs "punished"...

Thanks for all the help (so far :) )

[SmallTime]

mine went up this month (5 to 6). But I think blog pagerank can change easily (due to who is linking to you changing easily).

[Visit Thailand]

Forgive me but what is a weblog ?

[fmonk]

Sigh, it looks like they are. A search for my name shows my blog at #2 in the SERP, but it's nowhere to be found at www2 or www3, and from what I understand the dance has settled down, I hope not I liked having my blog so far up.

I wonder if it's cause by the nature of weblogs they appear like linkfarms?

(edited to add email notification of replies)

[andersja]

Visit Thailand:

I have defined blogs like this:

Weblogs are personal, online publications that can include links to news stories, opinion pieces and commentary, used for everything from personal journals to intercompany notes to supplementary news on major media sites...

Examples:
see
[jacobsen.no...]
and follow links to "other blogs" for more examples...