Regards,
Roger

The issue seemed to arise with non Feedburner users as well so I’m not sure that this particular problem was caused by them (although at first I did suspect something along the lines of the old 302 redirect issue caused by FeedBurner). They either didn’t get Tom’s feed or ditched it based on a similarity measure. I guess the latter. Sorting out the link in the feed should resolve it.

Then it sounds like Google might be tightening up how they deal with temporary redirects. If the problem persists after Roger has it fixed on Monday, I’d complain to FreeBurner and get them to turn their temporary redirects into permanent ones.

One thing I’m a bit puzzled by is how you think this might be effecting your PR. Blog Search is completely separate from Web Search, the former using feeds alone, the latter using Google’s spider. I doubt they interact.

One other thing: Regardless of this issue, I think it would be worth it for Roger to have the IrishBlogs.ie, &c. feeds changed so that they use the URLs of the original posts rather than pointing them to their placeholder.

We have always linked directly from the posts on the front page to the blog in question (apart from a couple of days about a year ago when we were transitioning from an old system to a new one). We used to have a “cached” page but we changed that page to remove the content and removed all links to it (at least that’s what we thought but we musn’t have done so if Google is able to find it). We left the title with a link back to the bloggers site so for old links people would be able to find the original content, which we believed would be in the best interest of the bloggers.

I’m quite new to the blogging end of things and the dupe content theory is quite interesting and something I will have to watch from and SEO perspective.

One thing that does come to mind though - recently there have been many anomalous changes in Google’s SERPs. Google seems to be making changes that are affecting the SERPs (perhaps in an effort to clean up their index).

You may have been caught in some overnight changes? I know that many webmasters were reporting problems in and around July 27.

I’m not familiar with how Google BlogSearch works. I presume it is simpy a separate index derived from Google’s normal crawl?

Maybe wait a few days to see if it settles down?

I wonder what has changed.

You are correct to say though that Irishblogs should “use the URLs of the original posts rather than pointing them to their placeholder”. Until they do that I think I will ask Roger to remove me from their list of feeds.

Finally, although, as you say “the content on IrishBlogs.ie is quite transient” (i.e. not cached) - it is still being cached on corkblogs - this could be causing problems too.

Oh, it’s not that link I’m talking about (though it’s a good idea to do that if you do ever move away from FeedBurner), it’s the ones FeedBurner generates in your feed for your entries so it can track who’s clicking through and reading them from your feed. For instance, the FeedBurner URL of this post is http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/tomrafteryit/TiBm/~3/6102708/ and it does a temporary redirect towards this page. It’s not entirely unbelievable that this could be what’s stopping it from appearing in the blog search and why IrishBlogs.ie’s entry is the one coming up.

He also needs to get the text area on the contact form made a lot bigger.

Keith - I’m not sure that FeedBurner is an issue because my use of FeedBurner is transparent. My feed is at tomrafteryit.net/feed not at feedburner.com/whatever.

Irishblogs could easily be destroying my PageRank if Google thinks I am plagiarising IrishBlogs content.

You are correct that Roger needs to get it to use the original post urls though.

keith

Now, the one big differenciator between your blog and mine is–besides the fact I use software I wrote myself and you use WordPress–that you use FeedBurner, hence my suspicion that the problem lies with how Google’s blog search and FeedBurner interact.

As I mentioned, FeedBurner uses a temporary redirect rather than a permant one. That’s like saying “this URL’s the canonical one, but go here for now”. But there’s no content on that page.

Now, it could be argued that Google should follow the redirect anyway and use that, but that could break genuinely correct uses of permanent and temporary redirects.

The IrishBlogs.ie feeds have some genuine problems (Roger should get his programmers to read what Sam Ruby’s written about his work on Planet Intertwingly), but my suspicion is that it’s not the true source of your woes.

But to be certain, you could ask Roger to stop fetching your feed for now and see how things go.

And how could IrishBlogs.ie be destroying your page rank? The content on IrishBlogs.ie is quite transient. If it held onto it like it did before Dermod got them to stop, I could understand, but that’s not happening. He also, as I said, needs to get it using the original post URLs rather than IrishBlogs.ie’s internal ones. That’d make it more aggregatorish and less weblogish.

There’s also the issue of HTTP headers and feed metadata. In both cases, your entry would appear older than the IrishBlogs one, and it’s likely that Google would use this heuristic to judge which one to use.

If my post isn’t included but my content is and it is linked to Irishblogs, then who is benefiting from my writing? Certainly not me. Irishblogs are getting content, PR and links from my work.

KeithG - there wasn’t a big buzz around this article. I just happened to check. I think irishblogs is destroying my Google ranking because I’m seen to be writing work which is also on a site of a much higher Google PR, i.e. algorithmically, Google may think I’m copying irishblogs.

Google’s indexing bots traverse sites more or less frequently depending on the frequency of content updates. Hence fast moving sites like Irishblogs.ie get scanned for new content more frequently. I’d wager that your own site will be listed within a few days.

The problem could also be down to FeedBurner. When it munges your feed, it doesn’t use the original URLs or a permanent redirect. Instead it uses a temporary redirect. This could be effecting your listing, but you’ll have to talk to somebody who works at Google on blog search about that.

Does it’s inclusion reduce the chances of a listing for the original post?

Or even if the Irishblogs.ie listing was not there would your original not be there either?

Cause without that kind of info I find it difficult to judge the context of your hurt
keith

the major issue I have is that my site was not listed anywhere in the Google search results. Only the Irishblogs copy of my post with a link back to Irishblogs. No link to my site.

keith (I am the One)