Ask HN: What did google do with my search results? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What did google do with my search results?

9 pointsdawie10 comments

When I google docley my web application site's description comes up, but it points to a different domain with different content (qdb.taranen.co.uk).

I am hosted with slicehost and asked them about this. Their reply:

174.143.153.245 is a Slicehost IP, but I see nothing in their account or records that I can find that would indicate they are pointing any DNS at your IP (which is how I suspect Google would have indexed that way). You may want to contact Google to see how they've come upon this index record for your site as I'm unsure of the specifics, but again, based on what I'm able to see I see no reason why this would be happening. They're not pointing any DNS records at your Slice IP so they're not (as far as I know) sending any traffic to your site via a URL you're unaware of.

I am not sure what to do or how to resolve this.

View on HN

If you look at Google's cached page, it looks like they fetched http://qdb.taranen.co.uk/ at 2009-11-06 07:47:43 and your page came back.

When did you acquire your current IP address? If it was some time around that point, my guess is that they had your IP address before you did, and thir DNS (or google's cache of it) was out of date.

I am not sure what to do or how to resolve this.

I don't think there's anything you can do aside from waiting for Google to re-crawl. For future reference, though, this is a good reason to only serve up your site in response to HTTP queries which come with the right Host: header.

I noticed that too. I have had this IP for about a month now.

It's still pretty annoying and I don't really know what I can do about it.

For future reference, though, this is a good reason to only serve up your site in response to HTTP queries which come with the right Host: header.

Or add a <link rel="canonical"> tag, see:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-y...

Or, even better, have a check to see if they're on the right host, and redirect them if not (that way you get the SEO+ from the other url).

Direct link to Search Results:

http://www.google.ca/#hl=en&source=hp&q=docley&b...

Have you signed up for Google's Webmaster Tools? It gives you access to see crawl stats and errors.

They have to crawl your site to establish domain ownership, doing so may or may not speed up the re-indexing process.

I just did that today.

On a semi-related note that mail from slicehost is excellent customer service. A lot of companies could learn from that - right now they're getting valuable free marketing on HN.

I agree that this was great support.

This was the entire email:

Hey David,

When I do a dig on the URL in question, it comes back with the following information:

dig qdb.taranen.co.uk

; <<>> DiG 9.6.0-APPLE-P2 <<>> qdb.taranen.co.uk

;; global options: +cmd

;; Got answer:

;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 21877

;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 2, ADDITIONAL: 2

;; QUESTION SECTION:

;qdb.taranen.co.uk. IN A

;; ANSWER SECTION:

qdb.taranen.co.uk. 257 IN A 174.143.153.245

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:

taranen.co.uk. 172800 IN NS ns.123-reg.co.uk.

taranen.co.uk. 172800 IN NS ns2.123-reg.co.uk.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:

ns.123-reg.co.uk. 2320 IN A 212.67.202.2

ns2.123-reg.co.uk. 2320 IN A 92.51.159.40

;; Query time: 218 msec

;; SERVER: 10.6.24.4#53(10.6.24.4)

;; WHEN: Wed Nov 18 13:10:06 2009

;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 126

If it turns out that they are pointing DNS at your slice IP you would want to send them (or their DNS provider, which is not Slicehost) a notice asking that they stop pointing the name at your IP. According to the whois records, their name servers are set with:

Name servers:

ns.123-reg.co.uk

ns2.123-reg.co.uk

Let me know if there is anything else we can help you with.

Cheers.

-- Ben H - Slicehost Join the Slicehost community! Notices and Alerts Follow us on twitter: @slicehoststatus @slicehost

Hunt down Matt Cutts or another Googleite and ask them to check it out. Such appeals have worked in the past.

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