As I previously mentioned, a few days ago I was testing some new features on Google CSE. Unfortunately nothing worked as expected. I tried using the forums and directly contacting one of the CSE team members with no results. Today, using a new account, I started fresh and everything worked as advertised.
Looks like Google’s Achilles Heel is client support and this doesn’t look like a issue to be fixed soon as Google is betting on crowdsourced support rather than investing in it. Short lesson: if something doesn’t work in Google and is not vital (gmail/adsense/adwords) create a new account and start from scratch
Incoming search terms:
1. Even though the last post here was on 22nd March, Google stopped crawling only in May, and that’s the date of the last cache. I’m curious how long does it take to resurrect a crawler on a hibernating site/blog. Results will be posted soon.
2. For some reasons, one of my websites has received a set of penalties on Google’s July update. Instead of submitting a re inclusion request (I wasn’t really with anything on the dark side), I completely changed the URL structure to something that I see now more appropriate. I rebuilt the XML sitemap and resubmitted it. While I wasn’t expecting any second day miracles, I wanted that the associated Custom Search Engine to show the correct results. Event though they say that they process in a max of 24h any new sitemaps, now after 30h I’m still seeing the old results
UPDATE: Just immediately after this post, crawling was resumed and the blog started ranking for same high traffic keywords. In short, if you have an old site/blog that doesn’t receive traffic due to lack of updates, don’t worry. Google will be right back at you once you start adding content