An Alert for Google

Nearly five years ago, I started building an ambitious stock photography site selling other people's work for commission.

Three and a half years ago, as we were putting the first final pieces in place, we let Google in to index. In the first six months, we did change some key pages, and were perpetually adding to the site content, but we diligently updated site indexes with Google. And Google faithfully reported the pages it crawled.

I gave it my best shot for more than two and a half years in business, but changes in the stock industry conflicted with the business model -- there were not enough sales to even cover operating costs.

So I pulled the plug, more than two months ago. Right about the same time the Google Alerts started coming in.

Almost daily now, I get alerts from Google telling me about "as it happens" additions to its index for pages that cease to exist. I think it's Google's way of rubbing the proverbial salt in my wounds.

Putting aside the question as to why it has taken three years for Google to index content it crawled years ago, why the hell are they even bothering to add non-existent content to their index -- and then send out an alert in the process?! Maybe this is what's bogging down their indexing.

So Google, here's an alert: if you can't find the page, stop trying to add it to your index.