Google Mediabot Hates This Blog?

Remember one of my previous posts which mentioned that I was changing the link structure of this blog? The links used to be something like firstmillionchallenge.com/?p=1, but they now look like firstmillionchallenge.com/google-adsense-test-results/. The URL does look more descriptive, which is a good change, however I think that this blog is really penalized by Google for changing link structure, especially since I was changing back and forth when Googlebot came crawling.

I noticed that the pages of this blog in Google’s cache all dates back to 7 December 2006, the date of my last post before I decided to play around with my link structure. Before I made the change, I noticed my blog’s content gets re-cached by Google pretty regularly. Now, Googlebot seems to hate this blog and do not seem to be updating their cache. Maybe it’s the fact that changing link structure resulted Google to detect a lot of broken links, or even perhaps Google detected a lot of duplicate content (the old and the new link structure). Either way… Google doesn’t like both of them, so this blog will likely go into the Google ‘Hall of Shame’, if there’s such a thing.

For those who have keen observations, you might notice that the ads served by Google for this blog’s homepage is also untargetted to my posts. I used to notice that the ads start changing usually after writing a post and I attribute it to Google Mediabot crawling and reflecting a change in content on the page. However, the ads seem to get stuck at untargetted ads, which is not common for webmasters using Google Adsense. Therefore, I conclude: The changing of link structure definitely affected the indexing of this blog in Google.

Now, it might take some time for this blog to get into Google’s good boots again. Maybe the search engine will like me more when it realizes that I have been blogging so faithfully twice a week and have stopped playing with link structure. Stretching my imagination a bit further, maybe I will receive an email from Google that says “We forgive you for toying with your link structure, don’t do it again.”

P.S: This is a good lesson for webmasters and bloggers who wants to get indexed. You should always plan your link structure first before submitting your blogs/websites to the search engines and other directories. If you have a bit of spare time, submit a sitemap to Google and that will probably help Google to index your pages more easily.