Whitey - 8:08 am on May 15, 2006 (gmt 0)

Please treat this post with caution - I've subsequently got my doubts as to whether it's genuine - maybe the moderators can take it out if necc.

I thought this forum was a hoax as i saw no response on any of the 100 or so messages.

Hopefully, this communication isn't a hoax either - it doesn't look like it, but who knows, there's a lot of uncertainty.

Can i just take the opportunity to thank all of the team at Google [ Vanessa Fox , Matt Cutt's - before you head off to Utah for hols and the other team members if indeed the content on this is true ] - I'm sure the rest of WebmasterWorld members would agree.

Not sure that loosing our top 10 positions and indexed pages is making us jump for joy at the moment - but we're hoping the prob will be fixed.

Some specific mention of the processes that you're going through and how it is effecting us would likely take a bit of the sting away as well.

Google Employee just posted this :

Hey guys, it's not a hoax and Ms "Google Employee" IS listening to
these posts and sending them off to the appropriate places [groups.google.com]. They just
aren't going to answer any single reports here.

"We do look into every report, though we may not have time to respond
to them all individually. "

The sitemaps team has done some things that were never done before, and
has done many things - handled many exceptions - faster than I would
ever have imagined possible within a large Corp. like Google. Google
used to be a super-secret "we ain't saying nuthin'" system, now we are
getting feedback like never before. Let's give the Sitemaps team a
little respect - they can't handle this issue by themselves alone, it
is something that is probably buried elsewhere. Kudos to Vanessa and
the team for putting up a thread about it here and for taking our
problems seriously.

I know you all are hurting and it's been quite some time, but these
things sometimes take their time and IMHO it's worth working out the
details if the index is better afterwards: I would rather be listed
under the 10 results for my niche instead of being listed in a pile of
100 spam results.

Let's continue to keep this thread clean, keep listing the sites that
got hit and the information that is required. [feel free to flame me in
a new thread :-)]

Thanks.

John

[groups.google.com...]

If this isn't a hoax, then there's hope.

[edited by: Whitey at 8:31 am (utc) on May 15, 2006]