In earlier posts (1, 2) I've described my frustration trying to get Google Search to direct users to the new site of my blog, which I moved from WordPress to a static site on Bitbucket in early March. Searching for my last name and a distinctive proper noun in one of my posts brings up only links to the old site. I had left the old site up, hoping not to disturb users' existing links to it. Evidently Google has judged the new site to be a knock-off of the old and declines to give it any pagerank at all.
I have signed up for various Google tools to try to evaluate the situation and change it. Google Analytics shows very low traffic on the new site. From my Google Webmaster Tools account I can see that Google crawled the whole site — 350 posts — on 8 March, just after I launched it, so the problem is not that Google hasn't read the new site; it's that Google doesn't respect it.
All right, then. Google's message is that old links to the old blog are not worth preserving. The old blog must not be allowed to stand; there can be only one copy of a blog on line. So I have deleted almost all the posts on the old site. I have left just three: the first one, the last one I wrote there (announcing the move), and one from perhaps midway through, complaining about my frustrations with WordPress. The first and middle posts also contains links to the new site and a statement that it has moved. Everything else (up to the time I stopped posting there) remains in existence in the trash directory of the old site but is no longer visible to the public. I could have replaced all the content of each post with a link to the new site — there is a way to do this automatically, downloading the whole blog, using a script to replace the content, and then uploading it all again — but I thought that would be an excrescence on WordPress itself and on my name. And the titles would still remain, which might still trigger Google's robotic suspicion.
Let's now see how long it takes for the new site to be treated as legitimate. I feel I've been forced to inconvenience others this way, but I have limited time to experiment further.
I see that WordPress immediately updated the Recent Posts and Tags lists on every page of the old site, but not the Categories list, which continues to show all the category-names from the now-deleted posts, in font sizes proportional to their numbers. I wonder when that will change.
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