Google Banishes Nicholas Carr From The Index

http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2009/06/banished.php

by quoderat • 17 years ago

22 15 17 years ago

roughtype.com

olefoo2• 17 years ago

Curious, the search http://www.google.com/search?q=roughtype.com

Brings up all sorts of URL's that contain the string roughtype.com but are not the site itself.

It's frightening, especially since we have no way of knowing what else is being filtered out and for whom.

I would tend to give the big G the benefit of the doubt; it's a mistake or he got on the wrong side of the algorithm, or his site was infected with malware. (that last one does happen see http://blog.oddhead.com/2009/06/22/un-hacking-my-blog/ )

But still, it is the reputational equivalent of logging in to your brokerage account to find out it's empty.

quoderat• 17 years ago

No way to know for sure, but it most likely occurred because of this: http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2009/05/for_whom_the_go.ph...

tjic• 17 years ago

Why do you assert that it "most likely occurred" because of this?

Do you have any data?

olefoo2• 17 years ago

I doubt they would be that petty, if it became a common thing for Google to apply the banhammer for mild critiques of their business practices that would cause irreparable damage to the brand.

We would all be trying meta-search engines that compared different result sets. We would be back in the late '90's trying to figure out which search engines were reliable and honest. (anyone remember Dogpile?)

Except that now it's all incumbent monopolies and high barriers to entry.

If nothing else this should give a boost to small outfits like DuckDuckGo http://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Aroughtype.com

jonknee2• 17 years ago

Why is that curious? You're searching for mentions of his domain, not content on his domain. To search a site, you preface with site:. http://www.google.com/search?q=site:roughtype.com doesn't contain any content (because he had spam on his domain and he'll make it back in the index in a couple of days after he removed it.)

charrington• 17 years ago

Wow! This is crazy. A similar thing happened to my friend Matt Harrison a while back. Here are the relevant links: - http://panela.blog-city.com/burninated_by_google.htm - http://panela.blog-city.com/back_in_google.htm - http://panela.blog-city.com/google_hates_me.htm

As Matt explains, he was re-added to the index with no explanation. Perhaps Nick Carr will have a similar redemption.

anigbrowl• 17 years ago

As indeed he has (see last comment on OP link).

bwd• 17 years ago

There is now a comment on this blog entry purporting to be from someone on the Google web search team claiming that the site was removed because it had been hacked and that Google had attempted to contact the author.

gojomo2• 17 years ago

The 'hack' must be very, very minor: I can still visit with Chrome, which supposedly checks Google's 'Safe Browsing' blacklist.

Maybe it's just hidden spam links? In which case, index-removal seems an extreme way to get the owner's attention.

AdamLasnik2• 17 years ago

Hi there,

I realize neither this comment nor the one on Nick's blog from my Google colleague Greg are authenticated, so you'll just have to trust me that I'm me :).

We do often remove entire domains from our index when there's evidence of hacking and/or malware... not to be mean, but rather to protect both visitors to that site and the site owner (from angry visitors). We can't be sure that the hacked links aren't or won't soon become particularly malicious (e.g., phishing sites), nor can we be certain that the server hasn't been or won't soon be more substantially compromised (with drive-by malware installs, etc.), so we fall on the side of caution.

We do make a good faith effort to contact the webmasters affected... - Through e-mail addresses we believe to belong to that webmaster. - Via our free Webmaster Tools service, where webmasters can sign up and opt to get e-mails from Google on just such occasions as this.

For more info, you can check out our most recent blog post on this topic: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/best-prac...

Hope this helps! Believe me, we want good content back in our index as soon as possible, too :)

sfphotoarts• 17 years ago

The comments on the article explain why, Google detected that the site had been hacked and had email the author of the site.

jf• 17 years ago

Nitpick: The host itself wasn't hacked. Part of his website had a vulnerable MT installation that allowed spammers to insert spam into that part of this website.

jonknee2• 17 years ago

That much is still unknown, he replied to say he was unsure how the links got there.

Google Banishes Nicholas Carr From The Index

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