Typepad Gripes

So one day this summer I wrote an idle post about how much I like my f.eet.  I think I have nic.e fe.et; my time outside gave me a lovely flip-flop tan, and I was fond of the toenail polish I'd just applied.  Plus I'm naturally a little bit vain about my fee.t and my hair. 

So without thinking much about it the title of this particular post was "m.y p.retty f.eet" only without the periods in between the letters.  Why did I just put periods between the letters?  Because, as a result of that post, I've learned how many folks are searching Google for nice looking feet.  And I don't really want to be among the top results for such searchers.  A few folks started leaving comments about the various things that they wish to do after taking off a woman's shoes. 

I decided that I'd get rid of the post.  Not a big deal.  I went into Typepad, found the post, and instead of the "Publish Now" button I chose "Save As Draft."  Bingo, the post is now no longer published.  If you go to the month and scroll through the posts, it's not there. 

But it still shows up in the Google search results for that query.  It's still there to searchers.  If you find the page as the result of a Google search, and then go to the next post, and try to go back, you don't find it.  In other words, it's invisible by navigating the Typepad navigation buttons.  It's only visible if you get to it directly.  But it's not gone.  It's not really a "draft". 

I'll leave it up for a little while if you want to see the phenomenon I'm talking about.  But then I'll have to delete it entirely, rather than just unpublishing it, because it's not really gone.  And if I don't want to be a Google result, I've got to delete the post.  An interesting glitch, it seems. 

Comments

[anon]

My understanding is that google has it 'cached' or something like that - it's not that it still actually exists, but just that Google has a snapshot of it. I think eventually it will go away.

[Anonymous]

I had a similar problem once with Movable Type: an angry person threatened to sue me unless I deleted a post so, concluding that life was too short and my bank account was too empty to fight, I complied and notified the angry person.

Then the angry person wrote to tell me that the angry person could still access the post through Google. Not the cache, but by clicking through directly to the post's file on my server.

I had to go into the FTP level, find the post and delete it manually. TypePad is built on a Movable Type-type engine, so it wouldn't surprise me if your post survived in some form on TypePad's servers even after you "permanently" delete it.

[ms]

A couple of the comments to that post are pretty sketchy. I hope you're able to get rid of the post entirely!

[Schteino]

Yeah, MT doesn't delete the file it generated when you created the post when you delete or otherwise "unpublish" it. You have to manually delete the file, and then, after some time, Google will notice and flush the entry from its database.

(I had a couple of Google links to me that I didn't want, and had to switch domains to solve the problem. I'd guess that once you delete the actual file, it'll take perhaps a week or so for Google to reindex and notice.)

[Philip]

you can also get to old typepad "drafts" through the comments made to them...

fyi

[ambimb]

Can you use a desktop blogging client w/TypePad? If so, you can write all your drafts offline, and only publish when you're sure you're ready. This won't solve the problem when you post something and then decide to take it down, but it could ensure that "drafts" that you never posted aren't Google-able.

More or less unrelated question: Is it true that TypePad users don't have to deal w/spam comments? If so, why doesn't TypePad hype this as its biggest selling point?