Search engines not finding Gromet's plaza anymore

[Observer]

What's going on?  I made sure safesearch is off and yet...  I've tried more than one device, google and bing... am I the only one?

[Tigerstretch]

Didn't find it on google, but found it on bing right away. Might be a temporary issue.

[teanndaorsa]

Anyone who is finding that the Plaza sites don't appear in any particular search engine, I'd be interested to know if they also don't show up when you search in an incognito / private browsing window.

There's no hint in the site traffic metrics that we've dropped off the internet in any material way, if anything traffic has been slowly climbing up over the last few months.

[icy]

The problem seems to be solved, It worked on Google and Bing.

I tried searching for grometsplaza, gromets plaza and even gromet plaza. It was always on the top of the search results page. Just the last search term on Bing didn't bring the main page but the maidbots page. Same goes for searching in TOR-Browser.

[teanndaorsa]

I doubt it's a temporary issue, more likely that it's something only affecting a subset of people. To know how big a subset, it needs more than a few people to check. It is clearly working 100% of the time for some people (including me), but that might just might mean it's isolated to one browser, or operating system, country, or internet provider. Or, it might be some setting other than "SafeSearch" that people don't even realise is set. Checking in an incognito window strips away all the history and choices you might have made in the past, and you see what a clean, anonymous user would see when searching.

I'm not especially worried right now because it seems to be a tiny number of users, but the more interesting reports are from the people who are experiencing it, even if they only find it on one browser or search engine. Searching on any browser in any search engine for any variation of "gromets plaza", "gromet plaza" or "gromet's plaza" should bring up the main grometsplaza.net site, or at the very least (Bing "gromet plaza" I'm looking at you), a Plaza site like maidbots.net. If you can find a case where it doesn't, that's interesting. Doubly so if that case still happens even in incognito mode, because that means that particular browser, operating system, country, ISP is changing the results to something different to what everyone else sees.

[bentbliss]

I tried out this on three different devices.

My desktop was the only one to test Bing which was fine.

As far as Google on all three, desktop running windows 10, Samsung galaxy s9, Samsung galaxy tab A7, it had the same response to on all three. This was whether I was on wifi through Spectrum/ Charter  or through AT&T.  The searches revealed the exact same results across all 3.

Typing in 'gromets plaza' only brought up one search result linking to the Writings of Leviticus.

Typing in 'grometsplaza' brought up about a half dozen results with most ĵust mentioning the site in text such as a redit post.

Typing in 'grometsplaza.net' and 'grometsplaza.com' resulted in links to various portions of the site including subsites and certain stories.

I then tried them all in incognito and everything worked fine.

I cleared all my history, (which left me to resign in and retype this whole thing as I tried that last before submitting the last post when I thought about it.) It didn't change anything. The results of each search were exactly the same.

Other than adding I am in the USA in Southern California, can't think of much else to add at the moment.

[teanndaorsa]

That behaviour from Google (only showing the Writings of Leviticus pages) I can get too, but only with SafeSearch set to "Filter Explicit Results" (the drop down to change that is on the top right of the search results page underneath three icons.

If SafeSearch is on, that's all working as expected. Well, sort of, those WoL pages really shouldn't show up either, and it suggests I've got to get the WoL sub-site registered as a NSFW site too. But Observer was reporting the site not showing up with SafeSearch off. If you search as a completely anonymous user, in an incognito window or not, the default for SafeSearch is "Blur explicit images" which doesn't stop our sites from showing up any more than "Off" does.

But thanks for the thorough testing though, that's really helpful!

[bentbliss]

I verified safesearch is not on and get plenty of other explicit things showing up in searches as normal. Think the only other that failed the search without com or net at the end was gaggedutopia and that one is hit or miss these days anyways. But deviantart, literotica, bdsmlibrary and a couple others came up with the sites at the top of the search.

Most of the sub categories come up if you add net the search. Some come up with basic input like self bondage but latexstories or latex stories had a million things but sites like deviant arts displayed early but never saw any mentions here. Maidbots required .net to get the search correct. Maidbots by itself gives lots of other things. Maidbot stories list deviant art in its top two then 7 more random things. They are all slightly different.

Main thing at least for Google for me is safe search is off and searches for other explicit things come up no problem for most of what I tried.

[teanndaorsa]

Interesting. So in incognito mode you see the site in the results, but in a normal window you see the Safesearch-like results, even though Safesearch is definitely off? If it's different when you're anonymous, that points at some sort of SafeSearch-like setting that has been turned on at some point and is now "sticky" in the settings saved in the Google cookies. Or perhaps a browser extension (because those get disabled in incognito mode). If you get the same sorts of results in both incognito and normal, that suggests it's your ISP or something similarly systemic effectively blocking the site, but that would be very surprising, because Google would have to be party to that; you might get the page not loading at all, but you wouldn't get a different set of Google results.

[bentbliss]

It is odd in that my earlier results are from home. I just tried it on the docked cruise ship before  we leave port and it works normal. I don't really know the difference in anything other than my location.

[Observer]

I'm happy to report that it seems to work again.  I wonder what caused it.