Carthik’s WordPress-related site, WordLog, has been banned from Google since its inception in 2004. And nobody can figure out why.
Google’s support department apparently always responds back saying the site is part of a spam link farm, but there is no such thing there, and according to Carthik, never has been. Yet Google continues to fail to list anything at wordlog.com in its index.
Exhausting other options, one person commented that using www. in the URI might help. Could it be that simple? I doubt it. I don’t believe using www. in the URI will help Carthik get listed in Google, as they list many domains which (foolishly) don’t use www. I think the problem lies elsewhere.
If you have any ideas which might help, visit Carthik and leave him a note.
I doubt that, my site is heavily indexed (for no reason at all..) and I’ve never used a http://www. prefix on it.
Comment by h0bbel — May 19, 2005 @ 6:48 pm
I’ve never had a site which had “www” and don’t have an issue Google indexing me. Perhaps Carthik is on the wrong end of WordPress.org’s little “article” debacle and getting tarred by the same brush?
Comment by Jonathan Stanley — May 19, 2005 @ 7:20 pm
I put the Wordlog site through the W3C validator, and it said that it couldn’t access the document because some of it didn’t match its character set meta (UTF-8). If the W3C’s automated bot can’t access the site its no great leap to assume that googlebot can’t either
Comment by David Russell — May 28, 2005 @ 4:13 am
David: If that was the reason, Google at least would provide a blank domain url as a result of looking up wordlog.org.
IO: Maybe what the original commenter tried to say was that Google may think that ‘www.wordlog.com’ was a different site than the non-www one, and list it.
Comment by Memo — May 28, 2005 @ 6:06 pm
That is not it. My personal site has a page rank of 7, and it doesn’t have a www prefix.
Comment by ACJ — May 31, 2005 @ 3:00 pm
You wish.
Comment by Mathias Bynens — May 31, 2005 @ 3:35 pm
No way. WWW’s have been known to be deprecated since long ago, and the theories around it have been quite solidly positive.
Comment by Oliver — June 1, 2005 @ 12:44 am
Considering that you come to the conclusion that “No, it won’t”, and the source was a random person’s idle speculation in a comment, it seems like sensationalism to title this post as you do. I’ve come here for the first time to see the arguments in favour of a http://www. prefix in the modern world, and have left with an impression that there are no concrete ones.
Comment by Jon Dowland — June 27, 2005 @ 4:05 am
Obviously not, Google just happens to have some problems that we have yet to figure out.
I completely agree with Jon Dowland, http://www. is not a protocol and therefore should not be implimented in websites. Unless you send mail to “person@mail.gmail.com” (no-www.org example). Oh well.
Comment by AlexJohnc3 — October 6, 2005 @ 6:26 pm
I was just looking in the SEO issue of the whole thing and decided that with http://www. might be a little better.
Why? Google some highly fought over keywords: Insurance, single word “adult terms”, etc. Most of the first page listings (in some cases all) use the www prefix.
And; visiting Yahoo, Google and MSN without the http://www. all redirected. I think following the lead of the big-boys is a pretty good idea on this issue.
As far as WordLog being banned for going without, I think not. Google isn’t perfect. This was probably just a screw up. And, this post is a bit dated. If you look now they she is indexed.
Comment by LoLo — February 18, 2006 @ 3:46 pm
LoLo–by that logic (i.e., we should “follow the lead of the big-boys”) we shouldn’t support web standards either, since Yahoo and Google both fail validation and only MSN’s homepage passes validation as far as I know (they do this to look good). Following what Google, Yahoo, and MSN do isn’t a very good idea necessarily and it ignores the reasons for No-WWW.
Comment by alexjohnc3 — February 23, 2007 @ 1:49 am
links for 2007-03-17…
http://www. is not deprecated the opposite of no http://www. (tags: internet standards web) FreeDigitalPhotos.net Thousands of royalty free stock photos for websites, PowerPoint presentations, newsletters, forums, blogs, schools and homework. (tags: photos free pho…
Trackback by Orangescale.NET: Bookmark — March 16, 2007 @ 7:37 pm
[...] Will Google ban your sites for not having the http://www. prefix? There is a wordpress plugin that will allow you to remove the prefix http://www. of your site, authored by Matt Mullenweg himself. However, another plugin that can enforce your site http://www.example.com to example.com and vice versa. These plugins found at http://wordpress.org might work easily for you but in any case you encounter errors you might as well try using the apache mod_rewrite. In your .htaccess file you can add this: [...]
Pingback by simplytaps.net » Blog Archive » Should we use www. or not? — March 19, 2007 @ 2:52 pm
www has nothing to do with the site being indexed. Google views www like a subdomain and that’s it. Look at your PR with www and look at it without, it differs.
Comment by Site Indexed — January 2, 2008 @ 7:35 pm
I dont think http://www. has anything to do with it. Maybe some competitor pointed many bad links to the site and that got it banned?
Comment by Tia Reyes — February 7, 2008 @ 3:26 pm
Tia, you’re a few years late: http://www.google.com/search?q=wordlog
Comment by alexjohnc3 — February 19, 2008 @ 6:50 pm