Google puts Running-Log.com back at the top of the search results

In the last post, I wrote about Google removing Running-Log.com from its search index. After fixing the root cause and waiting a few days for things to straighten themselves out, if you search Google for "running log" you'll see Running-Log.com at the top of the results again. Of course, this is very important in terms of getting more users to the site so I'm very happy to see that my earlier pessimism about the chances of being put back at the top of the results was proved to be wrong.

Running-Log.com removed from Google's index

When I moved the site to a new web host, I got complete control over the server it was running on. There was a risk that I would mess something up, but I felt that the benefit of having complete control over the environment the site ran in was worth the risk.

Unfortunately, I did mess something up. If you search Google for "running log", Running-Log.com doesn't appear in the results. At all. For the past seven years it was consistently #1 or #2.

It turns out that the web server was reporting an internal server error for a file that search engines depend on, robots.txt. Google stopped indexing the site at this point and after a while just gave up on the site completely. You can see this from this chart of data downloaded from the site (courtesy of Google Webmaster Tools):

I've resolved the issue with robots.txt but I really don't know how long it will take to get the site back into Google's index. Hopefully it will just be a few days. I really doubt that it will be placed back at the top of the search results, but time will tell. In the meantime, if you enjoy using the site and have a blog or website yourself, please consider linking to www.Running-Log.com.

Release Notes - Running-Log.com: v0.8

15: Add forums

Private forums have been added for teams. Public forums will be coming in the future.

225: Add teamid to links in recent workouts

Clicking a link in the "recent workouts" section of the teams page didn't show a link back to the team on the workout's page. This should make navigation easier.

226: Improving the Calendar - Difficulty in updating the Team details

Updating team details was broken. Now it's fixed.

Produced by FogBugz