Slashdot Mirror
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 ...
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.
The CB App. What's your 20?
1. Move all forums to Javalobbyforums.com or equivalent
2. ???
3. Hire 'little people' in multicoloured pointy hats to help generate traffic for your site not that it is now google acceptable
4. Profit!
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
They're on the Slashdot front page, I don't think they'll mind being off Google for a little while.
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
5. Have midgets properly proofread all posts
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
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.
Did you miss the memo? Google owns your ass now.
This is why people don't like monopolies much.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
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.
Go to Google. Type in "maps". First link is Google. If they really are the "home page" for 80% of the people on the planet, then that's most definitely stifling competition.
Maybe this is where Google needs to provide multiple indexing algorithms. The idea by giving different result types ( most linked, closeness to keywords, flashiness, highest rated, totally random, etc ), this would make it harder for site spammers to know which algorithm to be targeting.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I refuse to even click the link. This site, based on what I see here, deserves anything bad that happens to it. Millions of sites see their traffic rise and fall every day. And none of them take up our valuable time to post a sniveling bitch about it to the front page of Slashdot.
Dude. Slashdot is the last place I'd want to advertise. Their site will be down in minutes (what with being on the front page, and the article unabbreviated).
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Is there anything worse than Apple fanboys?
Definitely. Linux fanboys.
OP might have a point that this is slashvertisement. javalobby is on the top for the 4 primary search engines.
r c=IE-SearchBox= dir- 8&fr=b2ie7m icrosoft:en-us&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&startIndex=&start Page=1
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=javalobby&s
http://www.ask.com/web?q=javalobby&qsrc=0&o=333&l
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=javalobby&ei=utf
http://www.google.com/search?q=javalobby&rls=com.
I don't care f'r Google for personal reasons undisclosed, so I don't use their products.
They're not MY de facto site, nor do I consider TFA any more than fanboy buzz. Just like other search engines we've used over the years of 'net usage, they're just the one on top right NOW. Give it 10 years. They might be the next big monopoly, or the next Webcrawler.
Personally, I prefer the meta-search engines; more baskets means more eggs.
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
See the irony?
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that your lame site is getting more traffic than its ever received in a single day.
Which means that you've just been depending on Google too heavily for too little in return.
Digg it. Sig it. Promote the hell out of it.
I'd say this is a non-story, but the irony is that it was ultimately a wonderful short term solution to the author's issue.
Google does *not* own the Internet unless you depend solely on Google.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
I just visited your site just so I could joke around about being your single weekly hit.
Joke's on me and my poor eyes; I can't believe that you are ranked so high up at 50.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
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
Try typing any mis-spelling of javalobby. Anything. Google offers you the alternative of 'javalobby'. They *so* do not recognise this website... so much so that they dare to *suggest* it as an alternative to a common mis-spelling of the forbidden site. Bastards! How deep does their vitriol run?
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
Yes, downtime will come and go, but the page rank effects will be everlasting!
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
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
I had a similar, but opposite experience. I started setting up Yet Another Job Site, but I never got around to making it useful (see Click. Hired!). Google decided that it sort of liked it for a while, sending some traffic my way. I went from making nothing on my google ads to a few bucks a day. It wasn't much money, but it was fun seeing the traffic come in. Then google decided it was the crappy site that it was and my traffic went back to its deserved trickle. I wrote an article about it with pretty graphs:
:)
What Google Giveth, Google Can Taketh Away
I should have submitted it for a slashvertisement.
This has occurred with Snowboarding2.com as well. It use to offer a subdomain feature where snowboarders could create their own website. A spammer used a few subdomains and had cialis and other drug links placed to it all over the net. The subdomain service was ended a year ago and all of those subdomains have timed out for over a year as a result yet the site continues to be sandboxed by Google. A site that was on the first page of Google results since '99 is no where to be found. There is a difference between showing up on page 10 and being sandboxed completely. You can type in snowboarding2.com itself into Google and the website itself does not even show up. Google has been contacted several times regarding this and nothing has been done. A link campaign was also performed to overpass the amount of bad links with good links and that search term to no avail. With the recent Google update it is now a PR0 website when it was a PR5 for a very long time.
30% off web hosting. Coupon code "SLASHDOT".
Slashdot (and digg for that matter) only hurt the small personal and hobby sites run on the $19.99 hosted solutions. Traffic from slashdot to real sites running real businesses isn't all that much to write home about. Now a mention on Yahoo, that is serious traffic.
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.
Join the club, Alex Chiu has been blacklisted by Google for years.
http://www.alexchiu.com/spread.htm
A choice quote:
"Google controls 50% of the world's searches. This famous website is so controversial that it has been banned by the most popular search engine in the world 'Google'. That's right. You cannot find alexchiu.com in Google system. Some very important people don't want you to know about Alex Chiu. Alex Chiu is on more than 30 TV interviews, 250 radio interviews, and in business ever since 1996. Yet AlexChiu.com cannot show up on Google?"
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/
How Google handles hacked sites
As it turns out, Google is very professional on this issue, notifying webmasters, putting timeouts on the "sandboxing", etc ..
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
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
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
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.
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?
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
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.
I have a website that got around 600 visitors a day with a certain domain name (.fr).
When my host had to renew the subscription for the domain name, they didn't, even though I paid. Then someone "stole" the domain name when as it was free.
Now I had to buy another domain name (.com) and some a**hole put ads on my former domain.
Does anyone know what I can do to have google index the new one and give it the position my former domain name had ?
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!