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."

Re:Anti-trust against Google?

[NineNine]

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.

Alternative result types?

[Midnight Thunder]

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

[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.

Re:Never heard of them before, so nothings' change

[Utopia]

OP might have a point that this is slashvertisement. javalobby is on the top for the 4 primary search engines.

http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=javalobby&sr c=IE-SearchBox [live.com]
http://www.ask.com/web?q=javalobby&qsrc=0&o=333&l= dir [ask.com]
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=javalobby&ei=utf- 8&fr=b2ie7 [yahoo.com]
http://www.google.com/search?q=javalobby&rls=com.m icrosoft:en-us&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&startIndex=&start Page=1 [google.com]

Opinions are like diapers...

[UncleTogie]

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.

Ceases to Exist, but... site is now on Slashdot?

[popo]

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.

Re:Anti-trust against Google?

[MickDownUnder]

Do you know what the true irony of all this is....

Go to live.com search for maps...

1. Yahoo Maps
2. Maps.com
3. Mapsonus.com
4. Google maps

There is a link to maps.live.com. It is the #1 in the paid advertising section.

Isn't ironic that out of all the search company's Microsoft is the only one that seems to be supplying unbiased results?

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.

HA!!!

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.

Re:Never heard of them before, so nothings' change

[Cylix]

Yes, downtime will come and go, but the page rank effects will be everlasting!

Re:Man, I thought it was bad when I lost 50 places

[Skidge]

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. :)

Snowboarding2.com

[Solokron]

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.

Re:Never heard of them before, so nothings' change

[danbeck]

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.

How Google handles hacked sites

[AftanGustur]

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 ..

Re:What's the problem...?

[__aaclcg7560]

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.