blog Vs regular search

Google (in their infinite wisdom) appear to have moved all sites driven using 'wordpress' into their blog index rather than regular search.
I know that many people use the WP blog for posting useful technical notes. Does anyone ever use the 'blog search' ? I know I don't.
I've seen one of my technical sites (which use WP as a backend) move to the 'blog search', as expected this has hammered referals from google - down to 200 from 1100 per day.
OK, I can here the arguments coming now - blogs are for blogs etc etc.
Well, fair enough. But, when I'm looking for information I don't care what sort of site it comes from. But I'm not going to jump through hoops to get the information I'm looking for.
In this day and age, I expect a single interface to search everything. I don't expect to have to think, 'should I be searching blogs, images, or regular search to get this'. If I want to search specific parts then I can a specific keyword ie blog: or image: but I don't expect to have to go to a different page to do it.

Shame that they've done this with the Wordpress sites, it makes a nice CMS for organising certain types of sites. If I can't find a way of altering the wordpress software so that it doesn't enter 'blog search', then I'll be binning wordpress.

 

I don't know how Google would decide it's a wordpress site, but you could hide the fact that you're using it by removing references to it and altering the HTML output. (it might be as easy as removing this meta tag)

<meta name="generator" content="WordPress 1.5.1.2" />

Code (markup):

 

I don't know how they've done it.
I've removed the meta + various references to wordpress. I now need to alter any css calls so there's no wp- in the call.
the wp- bit is the only bit still remaining to be altered. Then I'll upload a brandnew domain and see where it ends up.
The other thing is the pointers/references for rss feeds. Nothing else that I know of simply uses /feed/ I'm working on changing this to /xxxxx.rss etc or removing the outgoing feeds completely.

edit: the movement by G is still going on. One minute the site is in the main index, the next it's not. Be interesting to see what this does to my coop weight. Will blogs still show in the API ??

 

100% certain
I first noticed it with a brand new site I put up last week.
The logs showed that Gbot had been visiting, yet a site search didn't even return the homepage. Odd.
I had a look on the beat blog search, and there it was
Earlier today I spotted one of my other sites seemed to have been de-indexed completely again it appeared in the blog search. It doesn't seem to be across every DC yet - as it keeps popping in and out of the index.
I'll be working late tonight removing anything that I think could identify it as a blog driven site. Otherwise, I'll be binning WP and rebuild the site with something else.

 

my wordpress blog shows up below my main site for my most important keyword.

 

I'm not talking about sites that have a blog as part of them - at least I don't think I am.
I'm talking about sites that are built entirely using WP.

 

I'm not sure the Google is smart enough to distinguish...

 

I think that they are.
This is only a guess, but I think that they are looking for something in the homepage. I've got sites that have a blog as only part of the site and they don't seem to be affected.
Sites that are completely based around a WP backend are disappearing from the main index - I know of others that are seeing the same.
When you think about it, it makes a lot of sense - I mean defining a site that only uses WP as a blog. Having them in a different index that requires you to go to a different interface to search them makes absolutely zero sense to me. Yes, it will possibly cut a lot of spam out of the main index, but it doesn't seem sensible to me.

 

maybe they are managing to find RSS feeders and index only RSS for their blog index rather?
Maybe thats the reason...

 

Maybe the site's in the sandbox.

 

a) sandbox doesn't de-index pages - I'm not going to give url's, but at times it's as if the site has gone. I was expecting it to hit the sandbox - it's a major rewrite for the domain, but having been at 1100 uniques per day, after hitting sandbox I wouldn't even expect it to hit 50 uniques (from Google). It seems to be retaining about 150 uniques, which to me says it's showing in an index somewhere - or the sandbox isn't global. I'm still checking referers etc, to see where's hit and where's not.

b) try looking with McDar's tools. You'll find various DC's where shoemoney's site has ZERO indexed pages.

c) this is something I only started to notice yesterday (tuesday) - and I was a bit worse for wares at the time, so wasn't sure what I was seeing. It's doesn't seem to be affecting all sites, but it certainly seems to be hitting pure WP sites.

Trust me, somethings afoot - I could be wrong of course as I'm still intermittently seeing pages returned with site: searches. But I'm not seeing them across all DC's.
You read it first on DP

I'm not saying that it's something that's going to stick, just that it's something that I'm seeing.
It makes kind of sense. Create a new index in 'beta' move blogs to that index, then add an additional 'addvanced' keyword to search blogs in the main index. What doesn't make sense to me is regular users having to use 2 interfaces to search - they have no idea at all whether what they are looking for is likely to be in a normal page or a blog.
In fact, many many 'Joe Average' users don't even know what a blog is. As far as they are concerned a web page is a web page - they know no different.

 

I'm beginning to think that I'm seeing something wierd. I've just run a check through McDar and I'm seeing different results every single time - that's unusual to say the least. Flux/change is never ever that variable.
I think I'll leave it 'til later in the morning and see what I see after a sleep - the last time I ran the check I saw 0 indexed pages across every DC, yet a site: search still showed results.

 

I don't understand why google only crawls my robots.txt and root directory. It's not doing anything elase, not going to any folder or any category. It happens to be a blog too.

 

When i started to advertise my blog. Google indexed it in about a week. It briefly showed up on one of google's DC and then it disappeared. It was not until i have read this thread and checkout google's blog search and found that my blog was index there.

 

my blog has taken a hit, I hope it temporary. Basically an old cache -Oct31 is showing- but if I type in the title of individual posts it shows the last post indexed as Nov5th.

Hopefully they place me in rightful position -#2 for search query 'Arsenal blog'- within the next week.