I couldn't remember when I grabbed my kristen.org domain, so I just did a "whois" search at internic.net and found that it was in 1999... boy, I feel old.

When I first got the domain, I simply parked my resume on the home page and that was that. Except for occasional minor resume changes, it wasn't until a few years ago that the site changed in any significant way. I switched my hosting provider to GoDaddy since it was cheaper and better than my previous provider.

When I switched, I accidentally copied my CruzTech html over to kristen.org. I noticed what I had done, but was too busy (and didn't care enough) to change it. This was before I knew anything about search engine optimization (SEO).

The big problem with copying one website to another is duplicate content. Google frowns heavily on duplicate content that does not add any value. It's okay to copy a paragraph of something you are reviewing and to point back to the source, but to simply copy html/text verbatim to another site is really bad. Oops... I had a serious duplicate content problem!

Of course this kind of thing happens innocently all the time. And, it also happens not so innocently by spammers trying to fool Google.

Google did still come to my kristen.org site but not as often as it would have if it had original and changing content, and didn't index all the pages on the site. In order to see what was indexed by Google, I did the search:

site:kristen.org

and it showed 4 pages indexed that had been cached between 7/12/08 and 8/22/08.

If you have a highly dynamic page (changes daily), Google may actually index it every day or at least every few days. My site was stale and it also contained the dreaded duplicate content. The reason Google even indexed any of the kristen.org site was that the 4 pages indexed were slightly different than the originals at cruztech.com (I had made modifications to the latter over time), so they weren't strictly duplicates.

Now I'm updating kristen.org to add real content and need to see how I can convince Google to index this previously stale and duplicate content web site. More on how to do this soon.