Parent Hacks admin: Google grumpiness

Parent Hacks has done something to upset the Google gods. Either that or there's a disturbance in the Force, because my site search box (which is powered by Google) is seriously wonky. It's not finding much of anything. Till it's fixed, your best bet for finding past hacks is to browse the archives and use your browser's search function to scan the page.

Anything else I should know? Is the site loading ok for you? Everything seems fine from my vantage point, but it's always nice to check it to be sure it's working for you, too.

Comments

[dAN]

All seems to be working ok for me, including the search box

The gods are appeased :)

[John]

Hi Asha, most of your site seems to be getting indexed as "parenthacks.com", not "www.parenthacks.com". Your search is only on "www.parenthacks.com". You can fix that by signing up with Google's Webmaster Tools, verifying site ownership and setting your preferred domain to "www.parenthacks.com". In addition, you might want to have your server do a "301 redirect" from "parenthacks.com" to "www.parenthacks.com". Once you've done those two things, it should get better pretty quickly :-).

[Ryan]

The URL to the site John was speaking of is at...
http://www.google.com/webmasters/.

You can see what John is talking about by going to google and typing a search in like this...
site:parenthacks.com baby
vs.
site:www.parenthacks.com baby

Notice how they are different?

And since this site is hosted on typepad, I wouldn't worry about a redirect as mentioned - you wouldn't have control over that.

[Parent Hacks Editor]

Thank you for the helpful comments. I've made all my adjustments to my Google Webmaster tools, and I also see that the search box is behaving better than it was the other day. Time will tell...