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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."
Javalobby? Another slashvertisement ...
Maybe you should stop relying on a single source for you advertising.
... wait, you did that.
Maybe you should actually monitor your forums. You know, in case your customers need your help or a SPAM-bot goes on a rampage.
Maybe you should actually have a site that people care about so they'll keep coming back.
Maybe you should slashvertise and
If your site is worthwhile, dropping off Google for a week won't affect it that much, and you'll actually have control over your forums.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
If they could have implemented one layer of security or verification to prevent spambots from registering (similar to phpBB or vBulletin), they would have prevented all this. But they didn't. There is no image verification on their forum registration page. All it takes is a spammer with a source of disposable e-mails such as dodgeit.com to spam your page to hell.
The problem is indeed deeper than just a headache for a webmaster or two. Let's face it: just as the desktop software market depends on MS Windows, and a lot of software companies will vanish overnight in case Microsoft introduced a new trick [like, signed - for a price - executables only, or backwards-incompatible API, etc], so the web now depends on Google. Should all the Google system administration team take a week off - and voila, you get no new customers, because they don't know where to go, and you're lucky if somebody from your old clients returns using his browser's history. Of course, there's Yahoo, MSN, Nigma, and a hundred of startups, but all of them combined hardly have the same significance that Google enjoys alone. So let's either keep our fingers crossed and hope that Google will not do anything more evil than it does now, or... heh, I don't really know even what else could we do.
Such cynicism; but you do have a low user ID, so I'll give it a pass as perhaps the voice of a soul beaten down by actual slashvertisements. Perhaps you should read the article and give the content a chance? Yes?
In the comments are some strings that one writer of theirs expects to find on their site when searching google, but didn't. I just searched for the "jgoodies data binding" and their site comes up the 7th top level listing on the first results page.
It seems to me that google worked perfectly here. When 50,000 spam and phishing messages were posted to that site, the ranking of it went way down. When they cleaned them up, the site ranking came back.
What, would the site owners have google preserve their site ranking even though the content on the site went in the toilet? As a google user, I'm quite happy that google de-listed these folks for a bit, because otherwise these and other searches would have been severely polluted.
Sean
Being a monopoly isn't illegal. Abusing a monopoly is. When Google starts using OEM contracts to force their competitors in another market off the desktop, then maybe you have a case.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
yeah, and if you search for KillerBob on Google, my site comes up at the front. If you type my real name, my personal website isn't even on the front page. On the second page, there's a couple of scripts I wrote over 10 years ago, and a story I submitted to BBSpot years ago, but my personal website still doesn't show up. Selection of keywords. If you type the name of any specific site, you'll get that site first. If you type what the site does, you may find that it's much lower on the page ranking. They probably aren't worried about traffic from people who search for the word "javalobby", because those people probably already know about their site.
They're worried about the people who search for terms like "java help", which is what somebody who *doesn't* already know about their site would be searching for. In my case, it's quite deliberate. I'm using robots.txt to tell GoogleBot to ignore my personal website. It's *personal*. All it is is an e-mail gateway, anyway; the blog is restricted access. There's no point in having it in Google, so the robots.txt reduces my daily traffic.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
I'm not intimating that anyone is entitled to any particular search rank, and I think it's rather irresponsible for the administrators of a large site to completely drop off the grid over the holidays (and, therefore, not notice that someone's posting thousands of spams to your forum). But to say that "Javalobby is at the top of the search results for 'javalobby'" is missing the point.
For those posts calling this a Slashvertisement because they'd never heard of the site before, come on. Just because a site you don't visit shows up here does not an advertisement make. I've been visiting Javalobby.com (and DZone.com, and TheServerSide.com, and Ajaxian.com, and EclipseZone.com) daily for about six months; aside from Sun's own site, reading this handful of sites is a good way to keep on top of Java news and software.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
I made a proposal in the W3C AC forum a week ago that would kill linkspam. So far I have not managed to follow up with Google.
The key observation here is that linkspam is not aimed at the reader of the blog, its aimed at the search engines, in particular Google. So all we need to do is to define some RDFa type markup that allows a blog to mark regions of the page as comming from a third party source.
There is also a proposal to extend the norobots scheme to allow marking of regions but I don't like that as it breaches a core principle of HTML: declarative coding. Norobots is an imperative command, 'this is external content' is declarative.
I should have a note ready sometime next week.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Making your whole business reliant on a single vendor is just stupid.
Especially a vendor that you don't even have a contract with.
People act like Google is a public service, Google is a business and as a business there is no reason why they have to index your site.
...and that is all I have to say about that.
http://jessta.id.au
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?
If they'd maintained their site properly, it wouldn't have happened.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Well, anyone stupid enough to buy SCOX deserves what they get ... but I notice the #1 article is boston.com (Boston Globe) - the same people who did the hatchet job on Peter Quinn for advocating ODF for Massechussetts
We know who was behind THAT one ... Microsoft. And of course they're behind the SCOX stuff ... perhaps this is just another Team99 tactic?
You're misunderstanding who the user of Google is. Don't worry. Most slashdotters make this mistake.
*You* are not the user of Google - You're the *product* sold by Google. The real users are the websites that are advertised by Google.
I don't know what % of the *on-line advertising market* Google controls, but if an anti-trust case were to be made (ie: advertisers have to play by Google's unfair rules in order to have an on-line presense), it'd be through that angle, not by allegedly controlling the "on-line search" market.
The positive sides of the story would in this case be twofold:
1. That a Java site not having as bad spam problems has likely gained notability to Google at the cost of this one.
2. That his site should be back in case he fixes his problems at the next Google spidering, at least if Google is consistent here, and I don't see why they shouldn't for the best of their search index.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!