Due to a comment of Sudhandshu on my article “Google Gears does not work with Firefox on Ubuntu 7.04” I thought I might give it an other try. I installed Google Gears again. However, I do not see the option in Google Reader to download the content to my computer. I can also not access the “Google Gears Settings” in Firefox.

My suspicion is that it has something to do with “glibc 2.3.5 or higher” and “libstdc++” which are required. In Synaptic on Ubuntu I can not find the glibc, it only offers me a glibc-doc. The libstdc++2.10-glibc2.2 is installed.

Maybe this is the reason why it does not work with my Firefox?

[UPDATE|22.11.07] Google Gears works now on my notebook! Read the story “Finally Google Gears works on Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn)” to know more.

One of my websites was mistakenly excluded from crawling by a wrong entry in the robots.txt. When I noticed the drop in visits it was already too late. The search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.) had removed the website already from their index.

I have changed the robots.txt immediately, but until now the website is not back in the index. I have checked in Googles Webmaster Tools and everything seems to be OK. I know it can take a while until you show up in the index, but from my experience it never takes that long.

Therefore I was wondering whether Google might have some penalty for websites which did not allow their bot to access the website. Maybe that it takes simply far longer until it can be reincluded? Did someone make the same experience? Any answers?