Google Clocking by North South Media

Okay, realising that two thousand and eight has got off to a monumental start for myself but a rocky start for others (think Hired with a big dubya) around the search environment I thought it was time to loosen those belts a little, deflate the chests and roll-in the chin and come up with a little game we can all play.

Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls, I give you Google Clocking …. ta, da.

Aye all right don’t all clap at once ….

The rules of the game are fairly simple. It is to see how fast Google indexes your blog entry.

You must start your blog post with “Google Clocking by [Insert Blog Name Here]” and then display a screen shot of when Google clocked your site.

I’ll run a table to see who has the fastest blog entry and then we’ll all know who has Google bot sitting rent-free in their domain.

Right I’ll go first - I have Google loaded, my post name is sitting within quotes in the search bar waiting for me to press publish. Right on your marks, ready, steady …. Go!

Update

Now I’m nearly at 30 minutes waiting for my headline to appear - it showed up on iGoogle in under 10 minutes, so I’m beginning to wonder … is there a filter on Google to capture any content with the word “Google” in it?

I mean, I have written some incredibly low pieces before and they have been indexed in fandabbydozy time. So, why now, why the wait … have I stumbled across some new filter .. am I being para … I dunno, I really dunno.

Now, I’m imploring anybody to have a shot at my experiment, the fun factor has fizzled for my liking. I feel like I’m in some sort of Kafkaesque nightmare [its nearly 45 minutes now] and still my headline doesn’t show.

I took the liberty some 10 minutes back to hit it with digg, nowpublic, ma.gnolia, reddit, simpy and a few others to boot. Still no sign. If anything nowpublic is “the” site to get your headline mentioned. I have seen posts curl up in Google’s lap in minutes since submission. And yet … nothing, Nada, Zilch!

45 minutes past the mark

Right, now I know its not my site … not this length of time. I need further proof, however, now more-than-ever I need to know that some content filter isn’t running against this site.

Google took a fair bit of bashing in 2007, although never from this site, and it just leaves me wondering … guys screw the game, for the sake of just knowing, post me your experiment findings and we’ll know once and for all.

Past the Hour mark and then some …

Ok, I’m thinking that my post title was perhaps a little to near the bone to sound like “Google Cloaking …” instead of “Google Clocking … ” I may be tired here and thinking in snapshots but even my own worn down grey cells are beeping at the resemblance. Still it may not be such a waste of a post as of yet. If there are Google Defcon word alerts out there that send bells going off in Mountain View then it might be interesting to collate them … then again perhaps not if my blog posts never get found.