Good news: site is back up and functioning. More on this in a following journal entry.

Bad news: Google cached the temporary “oh crap we’re down” page, so that’s the top hit for Aural Times until they cycle through and crawl it again.

Good news: 12,000 results. Hot damn.

Bad news: That’s a wildly inflated figure.

One: many hits for the site are duplicates from various pages of a given blog (well, several given blogs) that have the site sidebarred. So if Ted Blogger has 200 blog entries, and The Aural Times is linked in a site-wide sidebar that appears on each of those entries, and Google indexes Ted’s blog thoroughly, that’s 200 links from, essentially, one real link.

Two: many hits are for pages that feature, or at the time of google’s crawl featured, automatic RSS headlines from the feeds of other sites. So if Ted Blogger links me on his site, and his RSS feed is popular, then several dozen other sites may well feature, at least temporarily, a link to The Aural Times that they had no hand in at all.

Well, none of that is really bad news. Just reality-check news.