I’ve noticed a number of strange things lately using the site: command in Google. It seems that more and more of the pages showing up are pages that are very old, or have been specifically dis-allowed via robots.txt.

I removed a number of pages from a website in December, and Google still sends referals to these dead pages, despite the fact they haven’t crawled them in months. Add this to the strange problems they’re having handling 301 re-directs, and the amount of specious indexing problems you see, and you start to wonder if the wheels are coming off the wagon.