I’ve been reading The Old Drum.com for a while now. Recently it’s mostly been about the consequences for the hurricanes on the US oil, gasoline, and natural gas supplies. More generally it’s about the hypothesis that the planet’s oil supplies are on the verge of switching from more available every year to less available every year. This will happen. When it happens the current economic system is going to have to change faster than it’s probably able to. Something to throw on the pile of things to worry about along with global warming, bird flu, the US deficit, terrorism, etc. etc.
Today it was pointed out that the site, which is vibrant little community of smart people, is entirely invisible via Google. I’ve never seen that before. It really is invisible. Weird.
In the world of big-things-to-worry-about conspiracy theories are very popular. The Oil Drum used to be at blogspot, maybe Google’s carrying a grudge?
probably has to do with the robots.txt file.
the last line is
Disallow: /?op=
it might be consfusing this with blocking ALL the site.
there is some kind of help-desk at google where people will reply back.
http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py
Thank’s Ian. As of this morning google knows about the site’s homepage; so we can hope the rest will soon follow. They also removed the thread on the site whinging about the problem; so presumably they have resolved the problem.
Did you see the robots.txt? (http://www.theoildrum.com/robots.txt)
They are running scoop. So you can compair their robots.txt to that of other scoop sites. http://www.sciscoop.com/robots.txt is very similar and Google is indexing it. So Ian’s guess about the “/?op=” seems less likely to me now. Maybe it’s the “/~” rule?