so i did a little vanity search today and found a really odd result. there was a page from about 3 1/2 years ago which i took down about 2 years ago and was a subdomain on a free hosting site. the entire thing has been deleted. this site hasn’t shown up in the SERPs for about 2 years and even then it was on page 5. now suddenly it’s up to #6 even though it doesn’t even exist anymore?
this sucks because it is extremely irrelevant and associates me with several things i don’t want to be associated with anymore (no, nothing illegal or anything) which is why i deleted everything.
i’ve read about speculations regarding Changes to the Algorithm:
I think there has been a change in the Google algorithm which is upgrading older pages and downgrading newer pages.
notes “britishblue” on SEOmoz’s YOUmoz.
but, google, really? you think a page that was deleted 2 years ago is more relevant to searchers than, i don’t know, something that actually exists???
This entry was posted on Monday, September 17th, 2007 at 4:57 pm and is filed under Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
10 Responses to “Strange Vanity Search Result”
rofl kinda funny but crappy at the same time…that is ridiculous they would value a 2 year old deleted site over fresh content like you stated….as my site gets older I notice it’s ranking better…guess Google loves the old farts
yeah, it was kind of weird. it went away again after only a few days so i think google was doing weird stuff with the algo or something for a bit. thank god it’s gone again!
I had a site which i redirected 1 yr ago to another domain all of a sudden the old domain is somehow back up and ranking
Google def screwed up something
I’ve come across a similar scenario before. I have a site which ranks pretty nicely for a competitive keyword. Anyways, one of my competitiors went down in August and put a little “We’ll be back soon” page on their site. As of today, they’re still not back and the site is a few results below mine, quite strange if you ask me.
Strange thing you have there, it shouldn’t have happened I feel. But Google always likes to play strange tricks.
It is good for older websites. This is the seniority in the internet field.
I had a site which i redirected 1 yr ago to another domain all of a sudden the old domain is somehow back up and ranking
It is ironic that the older stuff becomes more relevant as time passes.
Oddly enough, I’ve actually had this problem before. My little sister was cleaning up her name results prior to her post-college job search and all of a sudden, a ridiculous dead page she made in high school started ranking quite well for her name. After a few days, it just disappeared and we haven’t seen it since. Perhaps Google figured it out?
thank you all for your comments. i can understand older sites outranking newer ones, but non-existent sites/pages ranking is definitely not right.
i was checking my results the other day again and found a parked page with porn links ranking for my name on the 1st page. it’s thankfully gone now.