Why doesn't Google like Accordance?

[pandakruon]

Has anyone noticed lately that Accordance's homepage doesn't show up in the initial results of a Google search? (Nowhere in the first three pages of results)..

 

I don't think it used to be this way. Google the word - accordance - and you'll find a Wikipedia article on Accordance and further down the page a link to the Accordance Blog, but not the Accordance homepage?!? Google the two words - accordance bible - and you'll only find a link to the Blog..

 

If I remember correctly, up until a couple weeks ago, even googling the word - accordance - brought accordancebible.com as the very first choice..

 

I doubt OakTree will be too excited about this..

 

Any idea what's going on?

[Helen Brown]

Thanks for the heads up. We are looking into this. Does anyone remember when they last googled us successfully?

[Justin Burt]

I don't tend to google things that I have bookmarked, but I have noticed lately that "google.com" does not visit this forum as much as it used to. I don't know if the two are related.

[Joe Weaks]

Even more disturbing is that googling for "accordance bible" displays my blog as the first hit (followed by some other, er, surprising results).

It hasn't been more than a month that I googled and got regular hits for Accordance. Even "Accordance Bible Software" is bringing up nil... this is not random and is something that needs to be followed up with.

[jpkang]

I've noticed recently that Google is returning very different search results as well (among other things, domain searches such as accordancebible.com don't always return the site itself as a hit).

 

Since Google is known for tweaking its search algorithm very frequently, it could just be a short-term experiment or a more significant revision to its PigeonRank PageRank algorithm (I don't know what link:accordancebible.com pointed to before, but the results are not necessarily what I might have expected).

[Helen Brown]

Yahoo finds us OK, so we are trying to figure out why Google doesn't. We have a team working on it.

[Helen Brown]

I believe we have a diagnosis, the cure may take a little longer.

[pandakruon]

I'm curious to know the cause and how you think it can be fixed.

[Helen Brown]

We're preparing a new design for the site, and have a .htaccess with temporary redirects, but that file was returning an error to the Googlebot. It is fixed now, but may take several weeks before our rankings are restored.

[Helen Brown]

I am very thankful to report that our listings on Google are now restored, at least for searches for Accordance Bible or Mac Bible software. Many thanks to the technical support people at our web designers Crate Media and our hosts ModWest who helped to track and correct the problem.