Orkut.com Problems in Google?

Date: December 13th, 2005

Everyday and throughout the day I often check My Yahoo! page for the RSS feeds that I watch on a daily basis. Today, from SEOroundtable.com, there was an interesting forum posting regarding Orkut.com and if they've happened to ban themselves from their own Search engine Google. Here' the original posting Google Bans Orkut?, and you can find the forum posting here, both are from Search Engine Roundtable.

Some Observations

Ok, so if you search for Orkut.com on Google you end up with nothing. I've captured a screen shot here. So you can see there's nothing showing. Now, if you search for Orkut in Google (see the screen shot here), you end up with one of the other urls Google has registered for Orkut, its orcut.com, and is listed in the second spot. Now what gets interesting, is that http://www.orcut.com has a 302 redirect to http://www.orkut.com/, and http://www.orkut.com/ has a 302 redirect to https://www.orkut.com/GLogin.aspx?done=http://www.orkut.com/. .... and only orcut.com is currently listed in Google.

But, it could be that for some reason they blocked Google from indexing the site to save on bandwidth (or some other reason) and not allowing crawlers, but the site is still indexed in MSN and Yahoo currently.

It'll be interesting to see how everything unravels (if it does). Check out the forum at SEO Roundtable for the discussion.

Gerard Manning
Search Engine Placement Specialist
Manning Search Marketing offering Managed Search Engine Marketing services