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When Your Site Ceases To Exist

Posted by kdawson on Sat Jan 13, 2007 06:40 PM
from the without-a-trace dept.
Businesses Google The Internet
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."
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  • Javalobby? Another slashvertisement ...

  • What's the problem...? (Score:3, Informative)

    by creimer (824291) on Saturday January 13 2007, @06:43PM (#17596922) Homepage
    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.

    • Re:What's the problem...? (Score:5, Informative)

      by stevesliva (648202) <[moc.liamg] [ta] [avilsevets]> on Saturday January 13 2007, @06:48PM (#17596992) Journal
      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.
      Phew. At least when you're caught in the crossfire in the spam war, it's just a flesh wound. The seem to be on the third page [google.com] of a Google search for java.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ShaunC (203807) *

      I just typed in "Javalobby" in the Google search and their link came up on top.

      If you know the site exists and what it's called, it's not very likely that you're going to be looking for it on Google. I think the idea is that Javalobby's copious articles had been showing up with good placement on Google, under more "generic" java-related searches (couldn't resist the pun). They were getting a great deal of traffic from these Google results because they'd worked very hard to build an original, content-rich si

      • Re:What's the problem...? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by creimer (824291) on Saturday January 13 2007, @11:35PM (#17599426) Homepage
        If you don't know what the URL is exactly, you may pop the name into Google to find it first. That's very important if you're browsing at work and you don't want to pull up a web page of nude chicks serving java in a lobby. :)

        Seriously, I know a lot of people who Google first to find the link to the website (i.e., type "CNN" to go to the CNN webstie). Some people are too lazy or ignorant to type out the full URL.
  • My joke site (SSLI: Search for Satanic Lyrics [dimspace.com]) used to be the number one result for "Satanic Lyrics, but about two months ago, ZAP! Gone from the frone page of Google. It's something like number 50 now, so instead of getting... ummm... three visitors a day, I get something like one a week :-)

    • 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.

    • Re:Man, I thought it was bad when I lost 50 places (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Skidge (316075) on Saturday January 13 2007, @08:18PM (#17597818) Homepage
      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! [clickhired.com]). 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 [lot42.com]

      I should have submitted it for a slashvertisement. :)

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Zeinfeld (263942)
      My joke site (SSLI: Search for Satanic Lyrics) used to be the number one result for "Satanic Lyrics, but about two months ago, ZAP! Gone from the frone page of Google. It's something like number 50 now, so instead of getting... ummm... three visitors a day, I get something like one a week :-) I see similar traffic due to the fact that my site is the number 3 for PI to a certain number of decimal places.

      I made a proposal in the W3C AC forum a week ago that would kill linkspam. So far I have not managed to

  • The Quick Fix (Score:4, Funny)

    by dj245 (732906) on Saturday January 13 2007, @06:45PM (#17596948) Homepage
    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!

  • What problem? (Score:5, Funny)

    by jcarkeys (925469) on Saturday January 13 2007, @06:45PM (#17596952) Homepage
    They're on the Slashdot front page, I don't think they'll mind being off Google for a little while.

  • Maybe... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Aladrin (926209)
    Maybe you should stop relying on a single source for you advertising.

    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 ... wait, you did that.

    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.

    • Re:Maybe... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 13 2007, @06:55PM (#17597050)
      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.

  • It's their own fault... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Codename46 (889058) on Saturday January 13 2007, @06:48PM (#17596986)
    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.

  • Pay (Score:3)

    by Duncan3 (10537) on Saturday January 13 2007, @06:49PM (#17596996) Homepage
    Did you miss the memo? Google owns your ass now.

    This is why people don't like monopolies much.

  • Is this normal? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by rumith (983060) on Saturday January 13 2007, @06:50PM (#17597010)
    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.
  • From the title, I thought this was going to be finding a mirrored copy of your website after you stop maintaining it and your host drops you. But being nolonger indexed?? That doesn't make your site dissappear - what a drama queen. Untill Google becomes the only search engine, or becuase a government institution, people need to stop being so dramatic. Websites existed before search engines as far as I understand.
    • Even if Google was the only search engine, why does JavaLobby assume that they have a right to be near the top of the results? Their site had poor content on it and Google indexed them appropriately. It's the spammers that are at fault, not Google.
  • whilst some people may have a point about the *cough* slashvertisment this article has made me think about Google and monopolies, should I now change my search engine of choice because having many players in any market is better or is a monopoly acceptable when they are (pretty much) the best... even if they do sometimes change where, and if, they list sites

  • Alternative result types? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Midnight Thunder (17205) on Saturday January 13 2007, @07:06PM (#17597168) Homepage Journal
    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.

  • The Wahbulance is on it's Way (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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.

  • Ceases to Exist, but... site is now on Slashdot? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by popo (107611) on Saturday January 13 2007, @07:53PM (#17597614) Homepage
    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.

  • Of course, google has already re-listed them... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jafo (11982) * on Saturday January 13 2007, @08:00PM (#17597680) Homepage
    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

  • It exists... (Score:3, Funny)

    by xwizbt (513040) on Saturday January 13 2007, @08:12PM (#17597766) Homepage
    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?

  • Ask Matt! (Score:5, Informative)

    by dekkerdreyer (1007957) <dekkerdreyer@gmaiTOKYOl.com minus city> on Saturday January 13 2007, @08:17PM (#17597810)
    If you would have tried doing even a little research, you would have found out that Google penalizes hacked sites [mattcutts.com] 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

  • Snowboarding2.com (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Solokron (198043) on Saturday January 13 2007, @08:25PM (#17597866)
    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.

  • Alex Chiu (Score:5, Funny)

    by tylersoze (789256) on Saturday January 13 2007, @08:43PM (#17598076)
    Join the club, Alex Chiu has been blacklisted by Google for years.

    http://www.alexchiu.com/spread.htm [alexchiu.com]

    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?"

  • How Google handles hacked sites (Score:3, Interesting)

    by AftanGustur (7715) on Saturday January 13 2007, @08:54PM (#17598166) Homepage


    How Google handles hacked sites [mattcutts.com]

    As it turns out, Google is very professional on this issue, notifying webmasters, putting timeouts on the "sandboxing", etc ..

  • This Is An Easy Fix! (Score:4, Informative)

    by sgtbenc (886605) on Saturday January 13 2007, @09:08PM (#17598274) Homepage
    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 [google.com]

  • Idiots. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Jessta (666101) on Saturday January 13 2007, @09:11PM (#17598294) Homepage
    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.
     
    • On what grounds? Google isn't stifling competition.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by NineNine (235196)
        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.
        • But how are Google preventing you from going to other search engines? Being successful is not against the law.
              • 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

        • 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.

          Go to Yahoo. Type in "maps". First link is Yahoo. Actually, it's rather interesting. For Google, the order is:

          1. Google Maps
          2. Mapquest
          3. Yahoo Maps

          For Yahoo, the order is:

          1. Yahoo Maps
          2. Mapquest
          3. Google Maps

          I don't know if that's a result of each search engine tooting their own horn, but at least you can't say that Google's map results are any more skewed than Yahoo's.

            • Re:Anti-trust against Google? (Score:5, Informative)

              by Bert690 (540293) on Saturday January 13 2007, @08:41PM (#17598056)
              And guess where live.maps.com is on Google's search? Go look... no it's not on the first page.... Go to the second page of results... Ah yes half way down.... HMMMM I think Google has a case to answer here, I simply don't believe Microsoft maps can possibly legitimately be ranked where it is.

              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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by LordLucless (582312)
      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.

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