We normally see quite a few people finding this blog via Google. It can be quite amusing to see what search terms led to us.
Earlier this month I decided to check it out again, there were no hits from Google. At all. This was kinda odd, as the googlebots (both for the search engine and for
reader) normally hit us quite often.
Looking back through the logs the last time Google hit us was the 14th of March. Which is quite some time ago.
I cruised over to Google and checked Reader, and sure enough the most recent article from our blog is dated the 14th of March. I then tried telling Google to index blog.etc.gen.nz using the WebMaster tools. No dice, it says:
General HTTP error: Domain name not found
Two things happened on that day:
- I moved from DynDNS to FreeDNS,
- I added AAAA (IPv6) records to some of my hosts, which is why I moved to FreeDNS. DynDNS doesn't support that.
It appears that one of those changes caused Google to start ignoring us. And in fact, it is the change to FreeDNS.
Damn.
I think it is finally time to bite the bullet and start running my own nameserver. Which I want to do anyhow to start using DNSSEC...
Some further investigations with the help of a mate (you know who you are) I've discovered that FreeDNS is rejecting DNS queries from Google. I'm
not the only one to have encountered this problem.
Update: The issue is FreeDNS. Updated entry to reflect that.
Update 2: Okay, the FreeDNS maintainer is now allowing Google to access our DNS entries again, so we're back in Google. But still, bizarre.
