Google weirdness

I can see why people might find the way that Google (the search engine, not the company) works a little strange. I’ve now basically dropped out of the listings for “tube snot”. (I generally do a check every so often just to see where I am in the rankings… It’s not weird at all… really! I have to know about this stuff for work.)

I guess it would be understandable — the page is over a month old now, and I haven’t really mentioned it again. What is a little weird is that it doesn’t show up as indexed as all — Google has actually completely lost track of the page. I have it in my sitemap that it gets updated monthly, perhaps Google just ignores all pages it thinks aren’t going to be updated?

Reading various SEO sites — urgh, it’s definitely a strange industry — they have all these mystical beliefs about how Google works. I can see how those might develop; it doesn’t seem to work in a particularly measured way. It’s more like a core algorithm with a bunch of hacks chucked on top of it. Which might not be too far from the truth?