tigertom - 1:52 am on Aug 4, 2005 (gmt 0)

Google makes its money from presenting relevant results; that, and its super-clean interface, made it famous.

It has to get rid of irrelevant results. Even two non-techy friends of mine said 'Oh yeah' when I mentioned these pseudo-directories coming up in them.

It's cleaning house. I've been at this forum long enough to have read similar griping about previous updates. At this stage it's comical.

Maybe I'm going mad, but I feel the urge to giggle when people go on and on ad nauseam about the behaviour of big search engines in forums, as if they'll heed long rants demanding the clock be turned back, and cursing Google.

The Contractor has made the most incisive analysis I've read yet. If he were evil, he could keep this thread going for a few more days by calmly stating the likely reasons for our bans, and wait for the angry repudiations.

Everyone else seems to be hoping to leave their site as is, or that by complaining at length GoogleGuy will rush back to the office and shout 'The webmasters are revolting!'

[cue riposte "yes, we know!"]

I'm in the process of splitting my (clean!) content to seven other sites, leaving my quirky misc. (clean!) stuff on my main site. I've removed the junk from all sites, and am now looking for any other minor infractions.

Then I'll stop blocking the GoogleBot via robots.txt, and see what happens.

Any helpful suggestions gratefully received. I put up a post about this, but it seems not to have been approved: too tricksy, or maybe more duplicate content (of material in other posts here).