From late 2004 until at least a few months ago, doing a Google search for Huckapoo would return a link to my exhaustive (and exhausting!) coverage of that band somewhere in the top five results (the exact position alternating with the band's official site, its MySpace page, Wikipedia entry and my New York magazine feature).
Today I discovered that my Huckapoo coverage has been demoted to result number 603. That's right: there are 602 better sources of information about Huckapoo on the internets than Radosh.net, including Les artistes dont la premiere lettre est H.
Now, the upside of scrolling through seven pages of Huckapoo results is that I discovered the previously hidden photographic gem above (see two more from the set here). But the downside is, what the fuck happened over at Google?
Seriously, someone with some tech savvy needs to explain to me why or how my site has been blacklisted as a source for Huckapoo information � which surely someone other than me still looks for now and then.
Clues to this mystery after the jump.
� I haven't been erased entirely from Google's database. Doing a site-specific Huckasearch still turns up 48 results.
� There actually is a hit for my site somewhere around result number 200. Only it's not a link to a post about Huckapoo, or to my site's search results page for Huckapoo � it's to the search results page for Prussian Blue, on which Huckapoo is briefly mentioned.
� The top blog result in the search is a Metafilter post linking to my first Huckapoo post. After that, the search turns up several different blogs all linking back to me long before it turns up my site itself. (When you do a Google blog search for Huckapoo, however, my site is number 6, which still seems too low.)
� This seems to be a Huckapoo-specific penalty. I'm still on the first page of results for Clique Girlz and Peter Landesman.
� I fare better on other search engines. Here are the positions of this site in Huckasearches on...
Live: 5
Ask.com: 9
Yahoo: 16
� But not always. I can't even find my site in a search on something called Gigablast, though it turns up several of my posts on off-site aggregators.
� When you do finally reach result number 603, there is a link to only one post, with no "more results from..." option.
It's an outrage, I tell you! Write your senator! Or at least give me a plausible explanation -- and be prepared to testify as an expert witness in the class action suit I plan to file.
