I’ve been moderately perplexed by the recent spike in traffic on basically unrelated keywords. Apparently this site is currently the #5 result for “fedora 15 beta download” despite my having never written about Fedora 15. In an attempt to funnel people to a useful page I created the previous post with links to the FC 15 ISOs. I feel bad if people come here looking for an answer that’s not to be found.
In looking into this issue I searched Google for the keywords and saw this:
evanhoffman.com is blockable
There’s a “Block all evanhoffman.com results” link under my site, but there’s none under any of the other sites. What the hell? Does my site somehow qualify as a spammer or content farm? Why do I get this dubious distinction? Ugh.
It appears to be related to the way your site handles searches with no results. For some reason, Google is indexing these blank search result pages. For example:
http://www.evanhoffman.com/evan/?s=gnome+3+fedora+compiz
I’m not sure why they’re getting indexed though.
I noticed the “Recent Google Searches” widget kept resetting itself and I guess that included the “nofollow” option I’d selected, basically telling crawlers not to follow those links. I’ll see if I can just edit the plugin and hardcode the nofollow in there.