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Posted on 7 May 2009 at 11:12

 

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Spider sense

Anyway, when I took a really close look at the Google entry (I know, I should have done this before) the URL wasn't for the live site at all. The Google spiders had picked up a folder on our main commercial server, which is where I'd put a prototype of the site for testing before publishing it, and it was this entry that Jake was complaining about. Unless you knew the exact URL, and typed it into your browser, there was no way of navigating there from another web page - except from Google, of course.

Interestingly, other search engines such as Yahoo!, Lycos and HotBot hadn't picked up the rogue pages. It was easy to fix, as I simply logged on to the server, deleted the files and sent Jake a message explaining what had happened. I then waited for the Google spiders to discover that the pages had been removed, which was a big mistake.

Last week I got another message from Jake. He wasn't best pleased. Despite the passage of two months, Google was still handing out his phone number to all and sundry. It continued to summarise a page that definitely didn't exist any more. Jake wanted to know how he could get Google to remove the link. The short answer is that he can't. Only the person who has control of the website can do that.

The procedure is fairly simple:

?€ Log into Google's Webmaster Tools as a registered Google user.

?€ Add the site to your list of registered sites.

?€ Verify your ownership.

?€ Specify the link to be removed.

The ownership verification is very important because without it any Tom, Dick, Harry or Jake could fool around with search results in a highly undesirable way. Instead, Google sends you a coded meta-tag that you have to paste into the header section of the page you want to remove. If you don't have write access to the page, you can't get Google to remove it from its cache. Simple. Five days after making the remove request the link disappeared and Jake was a happy bunny. Why does it take five days?

David Who?

Anyway, Jake should be grateful that he made a lasting impression on Google. I wish I could claim to be so memorable either on or off the internet. After working out what needed to be done to hatch the turkey project, I phoned Charles. We had a long chat about the program and I made an appointment to visit him. When I turned up it was, unlike the previous occasion, a lovely sunny day. Charles appeared in the farmyard covered in oil and brandishing a part from a tractor. He looked at me in a puzzled way and demanded, "Who are you? What do you want?"

Author: David Robinson