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When Your Site Ceases To Exist
El Lobo writes with a sobering account of how Javalobby dropped off the face of Google last month. The site had been attacked by forum spammers and Google indexed some of their spew before the Javalobby guys could remove it. According to a post in Rich Skrenta's blog, Google is now the de-facto front page for the Internet, accounting for anywhere from 70% to 78% of the search market. The power this conveys is hard to overstate. From the Javalobby saga: "We had completely disappeared from Google's main index! If you run a website, then you know how serious a problem this is. On any given day over 10,000 visitors arrive at Javalobby as a result of Google searches, and suddenly they stopped coming! ... Suddenly we no longer existed in the eyes of Google."
I just typed in "Javalobby" in the Google search and their link came up on top. If there was a problem, it looks like it's fixed.
You don't even have to code it yourself depending on what forum you're using. There are literally DOZENS of phpBB mods that are custom captchas, and all it takes is 10 minutes of adding copypasta to install them.
If you would have tried doing even a little research, you would have found out that Google penalizes hacked sites and even makes an attempt to contact the webmaster to alert them to the problem. Not only that, they'll relist you if you remove the spam.
1. Fail to follow even basic internet precautions standard since 1998
2. Whine loudly on Slashdot when search engine behaves as advertised
3. Get lots of new traffic
4. Profit
Dekker Dreyer
Because you are an idiot. Go back to live.com and see where it shows up in the *search* results for maps (sponsored links DO NOT count, duh!). I tried, and the site appears nowhere in top TOP 50 results.
Hilarious, come on all you Google fanboys/MS anti-fanboys.... try and spin this one into yet another Microsoft bashing session I dare you, then I can see something truly imaginative.
You've already succeeded all on your own.
It's extremely easy to get reincluded to the Google Index. Just follow the steps on their help: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answe r.py?answer=35843
Just because they show up when you enter the name of the site doesn't mean they haven't lost lots of PageRank.
They probably mean that they used to show up when you searched for "Java", but because the spambots created so many outgoing links they lost their PageRank and now you have to search for "JavaLobby" to get them.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
Javalobby dropped off the face of Google last month.
Good riddence! I dared criticise Java and OOP there and it started a long involved discussion. When the discussion ranked too popular on their traffic ranking system, the editors yanked it. They couldn't handle Java criticism so they pulled a "China".
It feels good when censorship aholes get what they deserve. Cheers!
Table-ized A.I.
How many days after a site has been transformed by hijackers/forum spammers/whoever into a pile of crap should it come off the top of googles search results? A day? A week?
60 days but you can request reinclusion sooner with Google Webmaster tools
There are several spamming tools that can detect the built-in phpBB image verification during registration. In practice, enabling this has almost no effect on forum spam. A solution that would help (for a while) are registration questions that can only be answered by a human (quick math question, etc.), possibly by replying to the registration verification email in a pre-defined format.