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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 ...
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.
Maybe you should RTFA - they're not relying on Google for "advertising"
Maybe you should RTFA - they DO actively monitor their forums. They deleted the messages very quickly - but too late, because Googlebot beat them to it.
Maybe you should RTFA - they DO have a site that people care about and frequently visit. But they want people searching for solutions that appear in their FORUMS to find those postings via search engines.
I don't see a double standard, yet. I don't know the GPs opinion on the MS Monopoly.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
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
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
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
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?