Google is broke - dropped site checklist

by Darren McLaughlin

I’ve seen tons of bad updates, and the newest one is the worst yet. Somewhere on June 27th, 2006, I watched the same few sites that have had trouble in Google for awhile drop in positions. What am I supposed to do to fix them? Nothing. What more can a man do? You can check:

• Have you 301 re-directed the non-www to the www?
• Do you have a duplicate content problem?
• Make sure your 404 page does not return a “200″ OK
• Run Xenu and look for broken links

Check, check, and more checks. But let’s face facts, we all know I didn’t change anything on the website in question. Wait, a new clue that Google is broke:

• They’ve appended “Valid XHTML Transitional” to the Title tag of each page and marked it as supplemental!

Alright, why in the hell would any search engine append the “alt text” from a W3C image file to the TITLE tag of every page? Good question.

Time to face facts: Google is broke, has been broke, and is going to stay broke. The particular site I’m mentioning has suffered from these broken updates since 9/22/2005. We’re closing in on one year of the “Big Daddy update” now. I think Google used to do a much better job than the currently do.

What do you think of Google search results now?