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

by dawie on 11/22/2009, 2:37 AM with 10 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.

  • by cperciva on 11/22/2009, 2:45 AM

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that point, my guess is that they had your IP address before you did, and thir DNS (or google's cache of it) was out of date.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

  • by on 11/22/2009, 3:05 AM

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  • by dawie on 11/22/2009, 2:43 AM
  • by dpifke on 11/22/2009, 2:52 AM

    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.

  • by mixmax on 11/22/2009, 2:59 AM

    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.

  • by petercooper on 11/22/2009, 2:56 AM

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