Friday, June 20, 2008

Flagged blog listed again

Four days after clicking the blogger flag blog button (to see what it would do), the blog post which I had flagged and then unflagged got listed again. During those 4 days, I edited and reposted the page that I had been viewing at the time I had clicked on the flag blog button. I saved the page to draft for a day which takes it out of view on the blog. I made more revisions on the page and then posted the page.

Then that particular page began to show up in some google search results. Using google webmaster tools, I could see that the blog had not been crawled since before the flag blog event. The only explanation I can think of is that some human intervention was involved.

In any case, I think the flag blog button is potentially hazardous, is too curious and easy to click, and requires no authentication of any kind. I had just clicked on it to see what it was. I was being dumb and flagged my own blog, but in some strange way a beneficial result has occured.

Although I did not notice anything that google would not like, it is possible that there had been something on the page that my edits corrected.

I don't know if it was flagging/unflagging the page, editing the page, or just ordinary google behavior. I hope that it is not the case that a blog can be taken out of search results just because one person happened to click the flag blog button once. The help page seems to insist that such a frustrating thing could not happen.

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