alwaysthinking - 5:58 pm on Jul 28, 2005 (gmt 0)

At first I thought an "underhanded" competitor somehow managed to get my niche industry directory deleted from Google, but after seeing each of your comments and speculations, I'm beginning to wonder if indeed Google is filtering out directories now.

If they are, I think that they better differentiate between "scraper" directories and human edited sites like my directory is. I have been compiling and publishing my industry links since early 1997 before there was a Google and before I had competitors, because I helped create my niche market sector by being one of the first in the industry, and definitely the first to promote the entire industry without bias by providing FREE links to all of my direct competitors.

Since that time (moving forward as the buzzwords go), I have been publishing updated versions of my original information as an "independent enthusiast" web site. By far I have the most comprehensive directory on this IMPORTANT topic (good thing the United Nations had the site bookmarked - no political comments please), and it's relevancy always helped it to be among the top in Google's SERPs, until early this morning. Most everyone worldwide has need some time or another to reference this information I provide, yet Google seems to be deliberately choosing to CENSOR the information in preference to some of THE WORSE scarper sites I have ever witnessed, along with a few, good industry web sites.

I have written to Google for explanation, and waiting for reply. Apparently it's not because of Google AdSense TOS violation (if indeed Google itself did the deleting), as AdSense ads still appear on the pages and clicks are being tallied from visitors finding the pages from other search engines. However, I only now obtain 10% of the traffic I had before being completely deleted from Google's data base.

martinibuster - I have similar suspicions that you have: I am now pondering if the "nightmares" that some were speculating about has finally began to crop up... jealous/unscrupulous web masters turning in competing sites as TOS violators or Spam scraper sites, and Google employees not familiar enough with the topic and its historic development to make an accurate relevancy determination in the few seconds that they take to judge a web site, deletes good factual content because of the disparaging words of a competitor or someone else with an axe to grind.

Nobody is safe from worry now (believe me I had one of THE most RELEVANT, UNBIASED web sites in a highly competitive sector)

Guess I should start making scraper web sites? They seem to be still in Google's SERPS in my sector.... That's the lesson I am learning from this example.

What say you Google reps?