

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

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).<p>I am hosted with slicehost and asked them about this. Their reply:<p>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.<p>I am not sure what to do or how to resolve this.
======
cperciva
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(or google's cache of it) was out of date.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.

~~~
dpifke
_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...](http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-
your-canonical.html)

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dawie
Direct link to Search Results:

[http://www.google.ca/#hl=en&source=hp&q=docley&b...](http://www.google.ca/#hl=en&source=hp&q=docley&btnG=Google+Search&meta=&aq=f&oq=docley&fp=20257e61c65c0f5)

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dpifke
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.

~~~
dawie
I just did that today.

------
mixmax
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.

~~~
dawie
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

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.

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

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

