Google Snippets Redux

Ah, well. I thought I had solved my http://www.geocities.com/ericbolstridge problem, but when I Googled "Eric Bolstridge" this morning it came up as the fourth result (behind ericbolstridge.com and this blog). Last night I posted links to some items I sent out to my Freecycle group. The links were to photos that I was hosting on my geocities page (since they have the oh-so-easy upload). I'm guessing that the few people that hit those links made my geocities site jump up in the ranks. So my brilliant "No Snippet" Meta Tag didn't work after all.

Looking into things, I'm now theorizing that Google is getting the site from Dmoz, the open directory. I listed my geocities pages with them way back in the day. So, I sent a correction to them, asking that they remove the site from their listing. We'll see what happens.

Google Snippets

A big part of this whole getting myself online thing was a motivation to get my old college Geocities website out of the top spot when people Google "eric bolstridge." Well, I've definately done that with my new pages, this blog, as well as updating my IMDb profile. But what really did it was simply going to Google and looking into how to force the solution.

Google bots troll the internet grabbing snippets from sites, and it doesn't update those snippets too often for unpopular sites. That's why my old Geocities page still had the old description. So, I added a tag ([googlebot metadata=nosnippet] or something like that) to my geocities page that would make the bot not list the site. Then, I requested the Google bot please re-scrape my site. A couple days later, the site is gone from Google. Yay!

ericbolstridge.com

I bought a year of ericbolstridge.com from GoDaddy, as well as a month of web hosting. All together, it cost me like $9. If I can figure everything out well enough, I'll sign up for a longer period and get a reduced price on a long-term agreement.

That was about a week ago. Since then, I haven't done much to get my website actually doing anything. Today I played around with writing something in straight HTML (a skill I used to have way back when), but I didn't really get far. I made a lame template using the Yahoo! Geocities Page Wizard, but that just sucks. I'll see about getting that up on there for now just to practice uploading and making my webpage "live." I suppose having something ugly up there will be something of a motivator for creating something better.

I was able to get the Sonic Roxio MyDVD software working how I wanted it to, by the way. I made a "real" DVD today, with chapter markings and music on the menu and everything. So that's pretty cool.