Dayo_UK - 10:54 am on Jul 30, 2005 (gmt 0)

IH

Well to a degree you can see Googles stand point - yep there should be a water tight case for removing sites at request of us webmasters. It is up to Google whether sites go past the quality control guidelines and if they feel they dont then DMCA etc must be necessary for the removal of the site.

However, Google might have moved the goalpost for the quality control and a lot of sites can then suddenly get effected by a "flip of the switch"

However, I am still open minded about what is happening at the moment - obviously sites that have been totally removed from the serps (No results in site:example.com check) I would be very worried.

But there does seem to be some evidence of a index rebuild going on starting about mid July. So at the same time as these sites being totally removed we have the situation where Google might be revamping the index - whether the removal of these sites is a side effect of this or the scraper fall out I am not sure.