Digg banned from Google?

http://martinmacdonald.net/digg-banned-from-google/

by trevin • 13 years ago

96 72 13 years ago

niggler• 13 years ago

I'd wait for an official Digg statement, because Digg may have requested to be removed from google search results (the net result would be the same)

jcampbell1• 13 years ago

Maybe they nuked themselves:

http://digg.com/robots.txt

shanelja• 13 years ago

I noticed that too, they are also missing a sitemap.xml

kyrra• 13 years ago

getting 404 on that file.

fmavituna• 13 years ago

I'm pretty sure getting 404 from robots.txt will not get you nuked from Google :)

ErikAugust• 13 years ago

You do not need a robots.txt or a sitemap XML to be listed.

franze2• 13 years ago

  curl -I http://digg.com/robots.txt
  HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
  Content-length: 1443
  Content-Type: text/html
  Date: Wed, 20 Mar 2013 16:27:13 GMT
  Server: nginx/1.1.19
  Connection: keep-alive

an HTTP 404 robots.txt should not be an issue - but maybe there was a robots.txt with something else in there instead, and now it's gone.

but even so, if there was an all blocking robots.txt site:digg.com would still show the URLs of digg.com, as crawling is optional for indexing. (maybe they used the non-documented Noindex: / directive, but i doubt it)

if you want to achieve such a clean removal, in most cases you must request a complete removal via google webmaster tools.

so yeah, somewhere, someone might have screwed up, most likely on diggs side, maybe on googles side, maybe a combination.

UPDATe: now it's

    curl -i http://digg.com/robots.txt
    HTTP/1.1 200 OK
    Cache-Control: public
    Content-Type: text/plain
    Date: Wed, 20 Mar 2013 17:05:29 GMT
    Etag: "c47ccf1a49c24cc5842430aa75c72ef491292412"
    Last-Modified: Wed, 20 Mar 2013 16:51:48 GMT
    Server: TornadoServer/2.2
    Content-Length: 24
    Connection: keep-alive
    
    User-agent: * 
    Disallow:

which is the best practice robots.txt (allow all, or rather: hey, i have a valid robots.txt file but the second statement is not a valid robots.txt disallow directive, so this means allow all as there is no other disallow directive (note: i once coded https://npmjs.org/package/robotstxt which tried to reimplement googles spec of the robots.txt https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index... so i have some experience in reading robots.txt files ))

still, it wasn't a robots.txt issue

hmmm, just a hypothesis: maybe just maybe someone thought it was a good idea to remove www.digg.com via google webmaster tools from google (as their main domain is digg.com and not www.digg.com and they definitely tried had some www.digg.com URL indexed, as even bing some some of these URLs indexed http://www.bing.com/search?q=site%3Awww.digg.com&go=&... ) but google is (maybe) set to treat www.digg.com and digg.com as the same (via the settings panel in google webmaster tools), removing www.digg.com then could result into removing digg.com as well (something similar happened to a client of mine years ago), so could be the issue, could not be the issue, we would need more data (access to GWT) to verify this.

highace• 13 years ago

It's cloaked so only google can see it - try changing your user agent to match googlebot's.

cpeterso• 13 years ago

Using the googlebot User-Agent string gives me:

  User-agent: *
  Disallow:

This robots.txt should allow all bots to search the entire website. However, I think Google also penalizes websites that serve different content to googlebot than to non-bot user agents.

blauwbilgorgel3• 13 years ago

That's weird because http://blog.digg.com/robots.txt does not cloak. Why cloak one and leave the other?

  Sitemap: http://blog.digg.com/sitemap-pages.xml
  Sitemap: http://blog.digg.com/sitemap1.xml

  User-agent: *
  Disallow: /private
  Disallow: /random
  Disallow: /day
  Crawl-delay: 1

TobbenTM• 13 years ago

It's up for me with:

  User-agent: *
  Disallow:

RyanMcGreal• 13 years ago

It seems to be fixed now:

    User-agent: *
    Disallow:

ryusage• 13 years ago

As another data point: I just clicked that link in Chrome, and I get the robots.txt with * Disallow like others are saying. Weird that some people are getting a 404.

kiallmacinnes2• 13 years ago

http://digg.com/robots.txt <-- 404 Not Found

I know a robots.txt 404 shouldn't de-list you, but I would have expected digg to have one?

Maybe they requested de-listing and removed their robots.txt? Who knows!

davenseo• 13 years ago

http://digg.com/robots.txt looks fine too me

randomdata• 13 years ago

There is one there now:

  User-agent: *
  Disallow:

kiallmacinnes2• 13 years ago

Yup - It's back now.. But it 100% didn't exist when I posted earlier :)

MiguelHudnandez• 13 years ago

The article is down, but here is the text from Google's cache:

    --snip--

Something interesting has just come across one of my networks (hat tip to datadial), just a few days after Digg have announced that they are building a replacement for the much loved Google Reader, they have (coincidentally?) disappeared from the primary google index.
[image unavailable]
Is it an SEO penalty for links? That seems to be the number one reason that brands are getting booted from google’s index these days… Some conspiracy theorists will no doubt be proclaiming its something to do with their announcement to build a replica of the now defunct Google reader, but personally I really cant see that having any effect. Could there?
Doing a site: search for Digg certainly demonstrates that they are no longer in the index:
[image unavailable]
Its likely (only if it is link based however) that it would be down to what individuals who submit content do after the fact – ie. sending spammy links at their posts to try and build the pagerank, and create “authority” which they then pass back to their own sites. Digg has long been listed in every “linkwheel” sellers handbook, and if that is the reason then what does it mean for every community site on the internet?

Will we have to manually aprove all new links soon at this rate? Come on Google – WTF – let the internet know what you’re doing please.

    --end snip--

Without the images, maybe I am missing some context. But it seems hyperbolic, considering digg is not serving a robots.txt anymore [1]. It is probably just a blunder on Digg's part.

[1]: At the time of my comment, digg was serving an xhtml document with status 404 at /robots.txt. Now it appears to be a valid robots file.

PS: I am enjoying the irony of having a copy of the article, even though the site is down, because of Google's cache. Need to pontificate about how Google is potentially evil but can't keep your server running? Don't worry, people can read it via Google's cache.

pyre2• 13 years ago

Why don't people just post things via a Coral Cache link when it's not a major site (that should obviously be able to handle the traffic)?

username111• 13 years ago

Because it isn't proper etiquette, it is their content and they should get the views for it.

Some people may not be able to handle it and caches are always nice but pageviews are also a nice thing when you run a website even if they don't generate any revenue.

perlgeek• 13 years ago

I just tried the digg.com/robots.txt, and for it me it says:

User-agent: * Disallow:

Which explains everything without conspiracy theories

philip1209• 13 years ago

Yes, this seems to explain it.

http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html

ecaron• 13 years ago

A "Disallow:" (without anything after it) is saying allow all robots access to the entire server. (If you need something beyond my word on the topic, there's a thorough explanation at http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html)

Alex39173• 13 years ago

It's possible (though not necessarily likely) that they finally got banned for their toolbar, which is basically designed to scam Google.

sjs382• 13 years ago

I'm not familiar with their toolbar. How does it scam Google?

Alex39173• 13 years ago

It makes it look like you're still on Digg even when you click the a link to go to another site. So essentially it makes it look like people are spending a lot more time on Digg than they actually are.

rada• 13 years ago

Google "digggate".

mikeryan• 13 years ago

Are they still using it? the current Digg is a whole new site rewritten from the ground up from betaworks I'm not seeing the toolbar at all.

Alex39173• 13 years ago

Hmm it appears they killed it in 2010, though I still see some browser plugins available.

uptown• 13 years ago

What year are you posting from?

qompiler• 13 years ago

Google has rules concerning SEO. A warning for the rest of us not to try to cheat our way to a better ranking.

blauwbilgorgel3• 13 years ago

Doing a site:digg.com/news/ search on Bing shows a lot of pages like these:

http://digg.com/news/gaming/ing_bank_i_ilanlar

and even more duplicate tag and rss pages for "site:digg.com/tag/" and "site:digg.com rss".

These /news/ pages 302 redirect to many different sites (some are bound to contain spam or be of lower quality).

302 redirects for these links is bad practice. Some link shorteners (ab)use 302 Found (instead of 301 Moved Permanently) to hoard content that doesn't belong to them. The content for these links can't be found on digg.com, so they too use the wrong redirect and associate themselves with all pages they link to.

Besides that: Digg.com acts like a single page webapp for most of its content. There are no discussion pages or detail pages for the stories. The content that does appear is near duplicate to other content on the web, especially with popular stories, where many blogs just copy the title and the first intro paragraph.

tracker1• 13 years ago

It's funny, but I've been pretty careful to add the nocache,noindex headers for many of the pages on the site I work on where a given page is no longer active... also, I would think that digg would maybe consider a rel=nofollow for any links that aren't "popular" yet. That may be the best way to handle the link spam.

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

I saw a similar pattern in the links that remain, it's sad to see the link authority of a site get plundered, and it seems like something inside Google's indexer realized that was going on and deleted it.

As a search engine its something you have to do if you want to consider site authority in your ranking model.

AznHisoka• 13 years ago

It doesn't matter if they were banned - they didn't care about SEO in the first place.

All those old URLs they had for years? All disappeared as they wanted to start fresh.

dredge2• 13 years ago

From my experience, when Google de-indexes a site, they also suppress any PageRank the Google Toolbar would have shown for it; that doesn't appear to be the case here, digg.com is still PR8.

Having toolbar PageRank[1] and yet no cached page[2] is not something I've seen before.

[1] http://toolbarqueries.google.com/tbr?features=Rank&sourc...

[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=cache:digg.com

jasongill• 13 years ago

Your experience may be limited, because this is very common. PageRank and indexed status operate independently of each other; it's not uncommon to see a site that was deindexed still maintain PR for quite some time (and often, indefinitely). However, if your site is deindexed, PR means "nothing" because your links no longer provide juice.

Valid PR while being deindexed is one of the (many) tricks that Google has added in the last couple years to try to reduce the usefulness of getting PR for blackhat purposes

rodion_892• 13 years ago

Their robots.txt file clearly asks to not be crawled at all.

  User-agent: *
  Disallow:

http://digg.com/robots.txt

blauwbilgorgel3• 13 years ago

Incorrect. To configure your robots.txt to not be crawled at all use:

  User-agent: *
  Disallow: /

Allow indexing of everything with:

  User-agent: *
  Disallow:

It seems they are at this very moment struggling to change things.

rodion_892• 13 years ago

You are totally right. Disregard everything I said.

chenster• 13 years ago

Disallow nothing -> allow everything.

Karunamon• 13 years ago

Betteridge's law of headlines strikes again.

Matt_Cutts5• 13 years ago

This has nothing to do with Reader. We were tackling a spammer and inadvertently took action on the root page of digg.com.

Here's the official statement from Google: "We're sorry about the inconvenience this morning to people trying to search for Digg. In the process of removing a spammy submitted link on Digg.com, we inadvertently applied the webspam action to the whole site. We're correcting this, and the fix should be deployed shortly."

From talking to the relevant engineer, I think digg.com should be fully back in our results within 15 minutes or so. After that, we'll be looking into what protections or process improvements would make this less likely to happen in the future.

Added: I believe Digg is fully back now.

jmount2• 13 years ago

The Star Trek TOS "The Ultimate Computer": Captain James T. Kirk: "And how long will it be before all of us simply get in the way?"

walshemj• 13 years ago

So was it the well known missing robots.txt killing a site problem (as described in the original article) or a manual action gone astray?

When you looking at protections you need to ask what happens of this is a mom and pop site and not a well known sv company with high level Google contacts?

jmount2• 13 years ago

I can't speak for Google or Matt Cutts. But it sounds like he said it was a Google bug.

luckynic• 13 years ago

Is this a stunt to put Digg.com on the map again?

relix2• 13 years ago

If this would happen to a less popular site, what chances does a site-owner have of getting attention to this problem, and getting it fixed?

WalterGR4• 13 years ago

None.

Even if you know people within Google, there's so much fear of allegations of impropriety that employees are too afraid to even ask the appropriate team if there's a possible mistake that they should look at.

drone• 13 years ago

A similar issue (removed from search results, but remained in index) happened to my site due to a DNS issue last year, and I had to perform some magic steps+ in webmaster tools and we re-appeared in search within a day or so.

+ no magic, I just don't remember what exactly I had to do.

Matt_Cutts5• 13 years ago

Hey relix, it took an unfortunate chain of corner cases for this to happen, and for this situation it was actually more likely for the corner cases to hit a larger site rather than a less popular site.

In general, when a member of the webspam team directly applies a manual webspam action against a site, we also drop a note to the site owner at http://google.com/webmasters/ . That helps the site owner tell whether something is going on with manual spam vs. just algorithmic ranking. Then any site can do a reconsideration request at the same place or post in our webmaster forum at https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/webmasters .

People like to scrutinize Google, so I've noticed that writing a "Google unfairly penalized me" blog post typically makes its way to us pretty often.

johnrampton• 13 years ago

@Matt How can 1 bad link on a site take down a whole site? Is this normal?

ConstantineXVI• 13 years ago

Why not take the 'nuclear launch' method? Every time someone's about to de-list [large number] of pages, a second human has to confirm it.

(This is presuming humans were involved at all)

cozydunt• 13 years ago

I see so many flaws with this process and small business owners that may not be able to get the attention that Digg just has.

Hamtron• 13 years ago

I would imagine it was more like:

Apply actions to (tick one) :

[] Individual Link [] Individual Page [] Individual Keyword [] Whole Domain

[SUBMIT]

And the manual reviewer was drunk on Google Juice :)

gurubunny• 13 years ago

Hey matt,If its a problem with one link alone then just take action on that one page alone, then it could be considered as action otherwise it can be taken as overaction. On the name of quality one should not take the whole site down for a day,This action of yours is completely wrong..

eiderv• 13 years ago

What I love most about this situation is the multiple theories, when in essence Google puts it very simply: WE F*ED UP. Sorry!

joetek• 13 years ago

Google admitted the mistake: “We’re sorry about the inconvenience this morning to people trying to search for Digg. In the process of removing a spammy link on Digg.com, we inadvertently applied the webspam action to the whole site. We’re correcting this, and the fix should be deployed shortly.”

http://thenextweb.com/google/2013/03/20/google-seems-to-have...

nicholassmith• 13 years ago

If you assume conspiracy then you're most likely ignoring the simple fact of life in the technology world. Someone made a screw up.

hugbox• 13 years ago

And nothing of value was lost.

Digg banned from Google?

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