HostingDirectory - 7:43 pm on Jun 2, 2005 (gmt 0)

I just came back from a search engine conference at the business center in islington - London uk, some guy asked this very question to the Google engineer but he would not comment on it.

So here is the question,

What advice would you give to a website that has suddenly dissapeared off the index after the Bourbon update only to notice that the site now has thousands ( in some cases over 100,000 ) scrapper sites linking to it?

It seems clear to me that Google is penalising innocent websites in the process and with Yahoo providing RSS feeds of its search results this will be a recurring problem for any site listed high in Yahoo - since the scrapper sites seem to be using the feeds to get the links.

A website can't do anything about scrapper sites doing this, especially in the number seen for sites that have dropped off the index. Hopefully these issues will resolve as the update is not finished yet, but if they don't... what advice do you give to the websites that have been caught up in the cross fire through no fault of their own?