yintercept's Journal: Moved Blog

I just moved my blogger blog from yintercpt.blogspot.com to the domain yintercept.com.

The blog was removed from Google with the last index update.

That happened because I did something rather foolish. Earlier this year, blogger added a feature that allowed people to add keywords to their posts. You can see all of the posts with a particular keyword by going to the URI /search/label/keyword. For example, to see the photos, you would go to http://blog.yintercept.com/search/label/photo.

I used the keywords as if they were categories and changed all of the inbound links to the site to go to the keyword pages.

Recently Blogger decided to exclude the /search directory in Robots.txt. That effectively broke the majority of inbound links to the site. With the majority of inbound links excluded by robots.txt, Google decided to completely delete the blog from its index.

This same story is probably happening to all blogspot bloggers who used the keyword feature.

Of course, the real lesson of this story is that it is a waste of time to write a blog that is under the control of a third party, even if the third party is one that does no wrong.

So, I figured that since the blogspot url was excluded from Google, I would start the process of completely removing the blog from blogger.

It is actually a bit ironic that a site owned by Google does not have an XML sitemap and does not do the best practices touted by Google.