I noticed last month that my Blogpulse Profile page was no longer staying up to date. According to them, my last post was on August 25th. I sent an e-mail asking if something was up on their end or if there was some problem on my end.
I finally got an e-mail back yesterday. It seems some code on this site was preventing their crawler from indexing anything. I’m not gonna post the code, who knows what it’ll do if I try posting it. The code basically looked like an HTML comment and contained the text “CDATA”.
Sure enough, the offending code in the e-mail was easily found when viewing the source at this site. I was sure something was wrong on the Blogpulse side of things, I couldn’t think of any changes I had made that would affect their ability to index this site. I was wrong.
I had switched the contact form over from WP-ContactForm to Intouch. I wanted to give Intouch a shot because it made use of AJAX mostly. It worked well so I stuck with it. Turns out Intouch was the source of the bad code that prevented the blogpulse crawlers from indexing me.
After reverting back to using the WP-ContactForm plugin, everything looks good. The offending code can no longer be found here. Still waiting for my Blogpulse Profile page to update though. I’d expect it to be back in sync by the end of the weekend.
I wonder what other blog services have been unable to crawl this site due to that code.
Linked @ California Conservative, Cao’s Blog, The Political Teen, Outside The Beltway, Mudville Gazette, Jo’s Cafe and MacStansbury.
Well, now what?
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Do you have any idea how often Blogpulse sends out its crawlers to re-index a blog? Is it every day, every few days or once a week etc?
Like your blog btw. Very nice!
From what I’ve been able to gather, it’s roughly once every day. Thanks for the kind words skater. 🙂
You might be onto something here. I’ve noticed that my sites aren’t showing up on Google or BlogPulse since installing that plugin. 🙁
UPDATE: I’ve noticed two of my sites that are using Intouch have since shown up on Google, updated with the latest posts. But nothing on BlogPulse yet, so i’m doing a small experiment, running one site without the plugin and leaving it running on the remaining blogs. To see if the one without updates on BlogPulse. If that’s the case then it looks like this only effects BlogPulse?
Yah, it probably only affects BlogPulse. Still, I’m interested in seeing what your test results show…
If it’s only the BlogPulse spider that’s affected, the author of Insight could probably fix it pretty easily. Maybe we could get him to implement a fix after your test…
Hi again Tyler. My experiment failed, BlogPulse still hasn’t indexed my site. So it would seem that with or without the plugin i’m getting no BlogPulse crawling 🙁
I’ve put Intouch back now, it works far better than Ryans original version.
Tyler, we are (or were) crawling your blog. See your updated profile.