I have an unusual problem with the Google search engine. I’m a member of a non-profit mostly volunteer organization for people with hearing loss. The structure is that the national headquarters is in Bethesda, Maryland (Washington DC suburb) and there are well over a 150 chapters throughout most of the States.
I don’t know if it’s OK to use real names so I won’t; hopefully that won’t make this post confusing. If a mode says it’s OK, I’d be happy to edit this post to make it clearer. Or feel free to PM me for the real names. In the meantime – fake names are in italics.
When anyone does a search for “organization’s acronym Manhattan” – the right information comes up except for ONE thing.
The first hit has “Long Island Chapter; Manhattan Chapter” as the title for the link over the description of the link. I’ve tried 3 other search engines (Yahoo, Dogpile, and Bing) and so far no other search engines have that problem.
This is a big concern for the organization and the chapter in particular because we think it’s confusing to the average person and that many people looking for the New York City chapter won’t click on the link.
Google is the most popular search engine by far so of course we want to fix this problem. Unfortunately I think it’s a Google search engine problem – I think their database must have gotten corrupted. That particular Long Island chapter doesn’t even exist anymore and their web site is no longer up. On our chapter’s home page which is the Google’s search engine’s first hit, we don’t refer to the Long Island chapter at all – either in the text that the casual user can see or in the source code.
I tried to find a contact to report Google search engine problems but only find a place to report Spam.
I did just see instructions on how to ask Google to “crawl” a web site here:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1352276
I'm wondering if that would refresh the Google database and get rid of the error.
Anybody ever encounter this kind of problem? I'd appreciate any suggestions. Thanks.
I don’t know if it’s OK to use real names so I won’t; hopefully that won’t make this post confusing. If a mode says it’s OK, I’d be happy to edit this post to make it clearer. Or feel free to PM me for the real names. In the meantime – fake names are in italics.
When anyone does a search for “organization’s acronym Manhattan” – the right information comes up except for ONE thing.
The first hit has “Long Island Chapter; Manhattan Chapter” as the title for the link over the description of the link. I’ve tried 3 other search engines (Yahoo, Dogpile, and Bing) and so far no other search engines have that problem.
This is a big concern for the organization and the chapter in particular because we think it’s confusing to the average person and that many people looking for the New York City chapter won’t click on the link.
Google is the most popular search engine by far so of course we want to fix this problem. Unfortunately I think it’s a Google search engine problem – I think their database must have gotten corrupted. That particular Long Island chapter doesn’t even exist anymore and their web site is no longer up. On our chapter’s home page which is the Google’s search engine’s first hit, we don’t refer to the Long Island chapter at all – either in the text that the casual user can see or in the source code.
I tried to find a contact to report Google search engine problems but only find a place to report Spam.
I did just see instructions on how to ask Google to “crawl” a web site here:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1352276
I'm wondering if that would refresh the Google database and get rid of the error.
Anybody ever encounter this kind of problem? I'd appreciate any suggestions. Thanks.
