If you couldn't tell from the title of this post, I'm not that fond of title tags at the moment. I fixed my little delete oops last night, resubmitted my site map to Google, and resubmitted the actual site to Google, MSN, and Yahoo. So far, none of those sites have crawled this blog and reindexed it. Just Bloggled barely shows up in the search results for all three search engines, and when it does, it's still screwed up.I've looked back at the backup templates on my hard drive. The one that I downloaded on 11/23 contains the title tag. The one from 12/13 does not. I guess that means that I accidentally deleted the title tag during that time. I left town on the 25th and didn't come back until the 9th. That doesn't leave a lot of time for me to have made that fateful deletion.
I just wish that I knew if it happened before or after Thanksgiving. My drop in RealRank happened while I was away so I'm guessing before, although quite frankly I have no idea why I would have changed something in the html then. I did change my favicon sometime before Thanksgiving from Blogger's orange B to my own custom one. Maybe I accidentally hit something then. It would also explain why one of the paid blogging companies didn't want to pay me for my post on the 10th. It probably wasn't showing up properly in the search results.
What gets me is that it takes Google, Yahoo, and MSN forever to index your site the first time around, but you make one little mistake like deleting your title tag and those three engines will de-index your site or index the previously correct listings incorrectly in a New York minute. Then you have to wait around for forever again to get them to fix it.
Of course, now I'm super paranoid about my html. I think that I've checked it 10 times today already to make sure that the title tag didn't grow legs and walk away. Like I need one more thing to worry about.
(Okay...I feel dumb at the moment. I just checked my Google indexed pages again. They're there (v. not there), just half are incorrect. You can only tell they're different by looking at the url at the bottom, as opposed to looking at what should have been the post title. Teaches me to hit the arrow button. Still my point is the same. Google hasn't crawled it since the correction last night. However, due to some results I'm seeing, Google crawled it an hour before. Talk about lousy timing...)
