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Google De-indexes Talk.Origins, Won't Say Why UPDATED
J. J. Ramsey writes "Talk.Origins is an archive with thousands of pages exposing creationist pseudoscience. Rather mysteriously, Google pulled the plug on its search engine, giving only the vague reason: 'No pages from your site are currently included in Google's index due to violations of the webmaster guidelines.' This was apparently triggered by a recent cracking of the site that added 'hidden links to non-topical sites,' but Google won't say just what the violations were. Talk.Origins webmaster Wesley R. Elsberry believes that this Google policy harms honest webmasters." From the article: "My mission, whether I liked it or not, was to find and fix whatever problem the [Talk.Origins Archive] might have, with no guidance as to what the problem was and nothing at all about where to start looking... I was extremely lucky. The damage to my site was limited and in the first place that I happened to look. Other honest webmasters might not be so lucky. They may have to undertake an arduous process of vetting pages, essentially having to second-guess the mind of the cracker in trying to locate a problem that Google knows the exact location of." Thanks to an alert reader who sent in Matt's blog posting about how Google handles hacked sites.
Nobody was evil here. The guy's site got hacked and spam links added, Google rightfully de-listed him, and then the webmaster found the problem, fixed it, and asked Google to re-list. Am I missing something?
was that he had no idea why he was delisted so he could fix the problem.
Sounds like you blew the cover there, dude.
People may be treating Google as a public utility, but Google (a private company) has absolutely no obligations to any website.
Ultimately, Google* has the right to change the rules when & if they please, in an arbitrary fashion, without consulting anyone.
*When I say "Google" I mean "the guys who own a majority stake in the company and cannot be overruled"
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I was under the impression that they told the webmaster the reason they were delisted, they just didn't tell the webmaster the specific pages that the reason pertained to. Like "Your site has been delisted for hidden links to non-topical sites" instead of "Your site has been delisted for hidden links to non-topical sites on pages index.html, intro.html." etc. To me, that's a webmaster job. Google did their job on their end. What if the site had hundreds of pages of non-topical links? What if Google spiders just stopped at the first one they indexed (as they should). Should google be in charge of going through this guy's site and telling him exactly where the problems are? They are a search engine, not a website security firm. People are getting lazier everyday and everyone expects someone else to do their dirty work for them. People need to take some responsibility and stop whining.
It might be good, but my point is that Google doesn't have to... and maybe shouldn't.
To some extent, part of Google's ability to foil bad website behavior relies on security through obscurity. If Google doesn't tell or hint to anyone how the cheat-detecting algorithms work... well, isn't that good for Google?
I could make the argument that since (as you argued) Google is a public company, they have to do what's best for the shareholders by doing what's best for Google. But that is an irrelevant argument, since there's really only three people whose opinions on the subject matter.
If Google ever did do something along the lines of what you're proposing, they'd have to put a lot of time & effort into setting up a system that can't be easily abused by link spammers, is easy to use for idiots, etc etc etc.
That may be more trouble than it is worth, compared to saying "not our problem, deal with it yourself."
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Google have a set of http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ tools for webmasters. essencially it give out every diagnostic needed to fix your site for Google. Additionaly you have statistics for searches and how GoogleBot see your site. So, you shouldn't blame until you googled for the answer! Searching for "Google index tool" shows up "Google Webmaster Central"...
If you say that that's a metaphysical question that cannot be answered, why not just skip the whole designer/creator bit and say that you are not interested in physical modeling of the world. Invoking an extremely improbable super-being to explain the world is very unhelpful. That's what earlier civilizations did: thunder was Thor riding in his carriage in the sky etc
What the ID followers want is a return to that using the logic "I don't understand it so it must be God's work."
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If you dig deeper, it turns out that Google emailed talkorigins.org to alert the site that it had been hacked and was stuffed with rape and animal porn spam. Google's head of webspam has posted a full write-up.