Google Continues to Ignore The Sand Trap – Why?
Posted March 6th, 2005 @ 09:52pm by Erik J. Barzeski
Google, for whatever reason, continues to ignore The Sand Trap. The site used to have .golf extensions (php [i.e. html] files served with the proper text/html MIME type and content-types), but it's had .php extensions for about two weeks now. Click the link above for a brief discussion of that whole mess.
Still, Google searches for "golf site:thesandtrap.com" yield no results. The same is true of MSN and Yahoo (both of which show plenty of hits on the forum, which has always used .php extensions).
I have no idea why Google (and Yahoo, and MSN) see fit to ignore the site. Though I realize it's not too helpful, the site's URL has been submitted to each several times. The robots.txt file is in working order. I'm not sure why The Sand Trap continues to be ignored. Heck - this site shows up first for some queries!
Can anyone tell me what's going on? I don't care how highly The Sand Trap is ranked - those things take care of themselves. But not being listed at all, why, that's just silly!
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Posted 06 Mar 2005 at 10:48pm #
Interestingly enough, I found after a while of messing around with search terms that a Google search for the sand trap erik will show techstra.netas The Sand Trap as the third result.
Posted 06 Mar 2005 at 11:12pm #
Perhaps they could send the GoogleBots your way. Last month Google hit my winonalife.com site for a gig of bandwidth, for like no reason.
Posted 07 Mar 2005 at 1:00am #
The Sand Trap shows up in Y!'s search results:
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=%22the+sand+trap%22&sm=Yahoo%21+Search&fr=FP-tab-web-t&toggle=1
Site specific:
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=site%3Athesandtrap.com+erik&ei=UTF-8&fr=FP-tab-web-t&fl=0&x=wrt
Anyway, I'm just starting to follow golf, and your site a great read.
Posted 07 Mar 2005 at 8:30am #
EJ, those Yahoo searches return either forum pages or indexes, which never had to use ".golf" files (index.golf was set as the automatic index).
So yes, we have some indexes listed, but none of the individual stories.
Posted 07 Mar 2005 at 11:56am #
I've been told that Google will not spider you unless there are links to your site from other sites. Also if for some reason your site gets spidered and they decide its invalid it seems to remove the site from being spidered again. This happened to one of my sites. I used to be in the top rankings when you entered the key word for the site. Later I changed the format of the site and being stupid I got rid of the entry point and replaced it with something different. I guess they got a 404 and the spiders ignored the site. It took several months again before my site was on google again.
Posted 07 Mar 2005 at 12:41pm #
Niels is right, Google Search ratings are based on how many people link to the various pages of your site. MSN and Yahoo also do something similar to this now.
Also keep in mind Google does some stuff to prevent ranking abuse from porn sites and the like. Sometimes links from sites or sections of sites that seem associated will be ignored. That might be why links from this site aren't showing up, especially if at any time these sites were on the same domain or something.
As a test I've added a link to you at the bottom of two of my sites (1 and 2) to see what would happen.
Posted 07 Mar 2005 at 1:26pm #
I realize that you need incoming links. There are a few thousand pointing at The Sand Trap, including several from this site. To simply not exist at all (in the search results) is not the same as not being ranked highly, though.
Posted 07 Mar 2005 at 4:46pm #
I don't think thousands of sites are linking to it, and those that do mention it are pretty low on the rankings. Aspyre and Foobuilder are only up there because of all the blog-linking going on by Aspyre members.
Anyway, we'll know better what's up after a couple days of the experiment. I'll leave the links up for a while, let's see what happens. Free linkage anyway. 🙂
Posted 07 Mar 2005 at 7:32pm #
You can also submit your site to be spidered at
http://www.google.com/intl/en/addurl.html
I don't know if you did this yet but this will at least get you on the list. It doe s not gurantee anything but its worth trying.
Posted 07 Mar 2005 at 8:30pm #
Did so many times, Niels.
Posted 07 Mar 2005 at 11:02pm #
Yeah I figured you did that! I know its very frustrating. I will also help you out by putting a link on my website at thoughtblog.com to see if you get spidered.
Posted 07 Mar 2005 at 11:14pm #
I did a search on
"LPGA: Annika Rules at 2005 Mastercard Tournament"
and the first link is
http://www.techstra.net/
When you go to this url it redirects to sandtrap.com. Not sure why, but maybe this will help explain why.
So it looks like your being spidered but there is a problem with the IP and the URLS.
Posted 07 Mar 2005 at 11:44pm #
When you go to techstra.net, you don't get thesandtrap.com. I don't know what you're talking about, Niels. The Sand Trap is hosted on a completely different server with a different IP address.
Posted 08 Mar 2005 at 12:54am #
They're not on the same server? DiG is reporting they're the same (SERVER: 192.168.0.1#53(192.168.0.1) on both). I can confirm that earlier techstra.net did indeed redirect to thesandtrap.com. Also Google seems to have cached thesandtrap.com at the techstra.net domain. Spooky!
Posted 08 Mar 2005 at 1:22am #
Hmm, weird, that Google Cache link should have been http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:TwKx2TY0tewJ:www.techstra.net/+LPGA:+Annika+Rules+at+2005+Mastercard+Tournament&hl=en. Oopsie.
Posted 08 Mar 2005 at 2:50am #
Foofy: "SERVER: 192.168.0.1#53"
ROTFL. Maybe you should check out the respective RFCs and learn what a private IP address is. On another note: download my hot warez from 127.0.0.1 😉
Posted 08 Mar 2005 at 3:50am #
Oops. On the plus side I do make pretty pictures! 🙂
Posted 08 Mar 2005 at 7:23am #
I had meta redirects for a few sites that pointed to The Sand Trap, but that shouldn't confuse Google.
Posted 08 Mar 2005 at 10:20am #
Hey I am only trying to help, but this seems to be your problem. Obviously it confused Google!
Posted 08 Mar 2005 at 10:24am #
Last Night it did infact go to Sandtrap.com from techstra.net Now that this is no longer the issue, hopefully all will be good going forward!
Posted 15 Mar 2005 at 11:28am #
I wonder if the 302 exploit has anything to do with it. Hmmm. Maybe not.