My resume was de-indexed by Google recently. I think this was because I did a 301 redirect from an old resume on another server to my present server with its own domain. And does Google get confused by that? You betcha.

I did some investigation and though there are recommendations on how to do redirects, which I followed to the letter, poor old Google still regarded it with suspicion. It’s probably because a lot of the old resume exists on the current resume and therefore Google knows that the new version of the resume has duplicate content that exists on the old resume, which obviously it has , and that therefore I’m scraping my own content. Give me strength. The answer I thought might be to remove the old resume on the old server and therefore eventually Google would crawl the old site, find squat, and therefore the new resume wouldn’t contain any of the old resume content as the old resume no longer exists.

In theory that sounded fine to me but Google still hasn’t re-indexed the new resume. I checked Google’s Webmaster Tools page and that confirmed that it hadn’t indexed the new resume page but Google had been crawling the new site like billy-oh. It even told me some HTML errors, like a missing robots.txt file.

As for consistency between Google Adwords, Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools, well there ain’t much. They can’t even agree on daily hit counts for the same page, on other sites I have. Further reading on Google’s ability to add up numbers (hit counts) does confirm that there is precious little consistency between their hit counting products. If I check any of Google’s numbers against Statcounter(.com) or my ISP’s log files then there is even more confusion and none of the hit counts are the same as any of the others. No doubt there are some brilliant reasons for all of these hit count discrepancies.

Suppose the best test would be to create a new web page, submit it to Google with a no-index option and Statcounter.com, then get 1,000 people to go to the page for 5 minutes and then remove the web page from the ISP and then see if the number 1,000 appears in any of the hit counts. Bet it wouldn’t