January 5th, 2010 by Joe Majewski
WordPress 2.9.1 just released, and it fixed some minor bugs from WordPress 2.9. This is just a theory, but I think that the reason my blog posts weren’t being indexed in Google as quick as they usually were was due to a glitch in the WordPress update, causing certain server configurations to fail when attempting to ping the Ping-o-matic service.
So if you’re a blogger and still using WordPress 2.9, check to see if your articles are being properly indexed, because failing to make the upgrade to 2.9.1 can be costly to you. Installing the newest version should solve your problems.
Ever since I installed the update earlier today, things have been running smoothly as ever in terms of Googlebot indexing my site.
On a side note, I apologize for making so many articles regarding this issue, but it was something that needed to be resolved. I hope that anyone else suffering from this WordPress glitch has it fixed ASAP.
Detective Joe was on the case, and it is now officially closed. Have a nice day. 
January 4th, 2010 by Joe Majewski
By using Google’s site operator, you can quickly see a list of pages that Google has indexed on any given website, or even directories or subdomains within a website. For example, performing a Google search for site:www.JoeMajewski.com, you will retrieve a full list of all pages that Google has found on my (this) website.
Usually, my new blog posts are indexed within minutes of being posted. Worst case scenario it would take thirty minutes, but never longer than that. The reason this happens is because WordPress pings a service that lets Googlebot know that new content has arrived upon publishing a new article.
Lately, this has changed. It has been 4 days since I posted an article about Google performing their PageRank update, and that submission has yet to be indexed on Google. This may be ironically due to the PageRank update causing it to be lost during the process, but I cannot think of any other reason as to why it still wouldn’t be indexed.
I have also written an article about an hour ago (that is unrelated to most other entries that I write) that is also not yet indexed by Google. I am assuming that the PageRank update is complete, and that things are back to normal (no more Google Dance, as the SEO geeks call it), so that tosses that theory out the window. But perhaps it is not indexed because of the fact that it’s unrelated to most of my other content.
I would be disappointed if Google changed the way that they archive blog posts, as I always enjoyed seeing my latest submissions show up on the search engine minutes after being published. If anyone has an explanation for as to why it is taking so long to get my articles archived, please comment and let me know.
Another reason this baffles me is because I just received PageRank 2, meaning that I should have more priority than I did before, so if anything was to change, I would expect it to be for the better. I will continue to investigate this issue, as I find it important for my content to be archived as soon as possible for best performance.
As always, I’ll keep you updated if I figure anything out. There must be some reason for the slow indexing that I’m receiving, and I’m curious to know if this is happening to others as well. Over and out.
December 25th, 2009 by Joe Majewski
It wasn’t long before many of the pages on this site began being assigned PageRank 0 (PR0), which baffled me at first. I had always been under the impression that PageRank was something that took many months to update. It seems that perhaps PageRank 0 is the exception, or maybe Google assigns PageRank values based off of the PageRank of the rest of the site.
This simple hypothesis would explain why certain YouTube videos achieve PR3 or PR4 weeks after being released, as they are quickly crawled and assigned a temporary PageRank during the period of time between legitimate updates to preserve Google’s accurate results.
Google’s results are constantly changing due to what they refer to as “rolling updates”, made to keep everything up to date. If it took three months for all new pages on the Internet to become valuable to the search engine then there would be millions of outdated pages that “deserved” to be atop the lists but didn’t make the PR update “cut”.
I wouldn’t want to give myself a bad name, so I am going to stand out and admit that this is all just my simple explanation based off of observations that I’ve made. This would also explain why some websites dramatically rise or fall in PageRank seemingly overnight, as the “legitimate” update rolls through and determines a more suitable PageRank for that specific website.
Who knows? Maybe Google truly believes that this website has already earned a PageRank 2, but because of the fact that the official update has not yet been run through, all I can do is wait and find out. For the time being, all of my pages will either be labeled as PR0 or PR N/A.
There is a lot of mystery behind the infamous PageRank algorithm, and I am slowly beginning to understand more and more about it. It will be a happy day once I log onto the Internet to find that this site has got some green on that bar (you know what I’m talking about).
And oh, how I despise the waiting game.