Can a Google emplyee ban your site.

Just because they don't like you or any personal reason?

[Phil_S]

Can a Google emplyee ban your site.

Just because they don't like you or any other personal reason?

Scary question!

But can it happen, or is there some kind of policy at Google to prevent this?

[ncsuk]

GG what have you done now :)

In answer to your question though I think it would be best to mail a random person at Google and ask them as im sure GG is not going to want to answer that on principle.

[BigDave]

I'm certain there is a policy against it. That doesn't mean that it can't happen.

Get ready for a tough battle, and make sure your site is extremely clan (and always has been) before you make such accusations though.

[ciml]

It's a scary world when you ask these questions (think telephone company, ISP, hosting provider, bank, tax authorities, etc.)

Google has a pretty amazing corporate culture. It's not all about stock options and flash cars, it's not even about 21st century working conditions or having a cool chef. I think Google engineers are about the least likely people to purposely hurt the quality of the service they provide.

[jomaxx]

There are some Google employees who could theoretically do this, obviously. I think it also stands to reason that Google would frown on it, and that the majority of Google employees would not have access to any means of doing so.

Is there some reason you are asking this question?

[EliteWeb]

If I can pick up my phone and make a call to Yahoo and have a site added within minutes you figure I could do the same to have a site removed. Google on the other hand I've never had any sort of removal/inclusion based off a conversation it seems all remarks are that its automated. Remove a site from Google by picking up the phone and calling someone, if you had enough influence im sure its possible -- Call it off as a spam site.

[Phil_S]

Just curious.

I do know one of my competitors who was banned from Google.
I can't figure out what they did, but I'm curious.

They are a really big company and had a PR7 about 10,000 pages and a few thousand back links.

They came up for almost every term related to our industry.

Now they have been completely removed. And I think it happened in-between updates, so I assume it was manually done.

Maybe the only other thing I can think of is, they have black background with white text, and they have a link on the page to a printable page that's the same exact page but with white background and black text ( but it is a .php page). They have this for almost every page. Maybe this caused some kind of dup content and got them in trouble

Thanks.

[satanclaus]

What a question. As if most people weren't paranoid enough.

[Chris_R]

Of course they can - just as any member of the miltary that is armed could shoot you - or druggist poison you - or anything else.

I have not heard any credible accusations that google has done anything like this.

In fact - there are quite a few anti google pages on the web - even some containing VERY personal information [almost slanderous remarks] about a very handsome and intelligent google employee that will remain nameless but whose last names rhymes with butts.

I am 90% sure that someone using their position for a personal vendetta would not be around to do such a thing in the future.

As pointed out - I doubt google's chef or MOST employees for that matter could even do this if they wanted to.

It can be done - and has been done for legal reasons.

I don't think people have much to worry about. On the positive side - the impression I got at pubcon is that google is looking for more transparency on WHY someone was banned in the future...

[iSeeker]

Yes I think this can happen. My site got banned last year. I confess that I was guilty on that occasion.

I started from scratch and created a clean replacement site. Inexplicably, the new site was also banned. Two subsequent replacements were also banned. I still do not know why those sites were suddenly removed. Perhaps the employee(s) involved form a negative impression of individuals and it is difficult to change that impression.

It is difficult for human beings to be totally unbiased. GoogleGuy mentioned that they were trying to place more emphasis on “scalable filters”. I think that this would be a good way to eliminate human bias.

When sites disappear mysteriously, people are less inclined to invest time in creating quality sites. This is neither good for webmasters, search engines nor users.

[rfgdxm1]

Most definitely a Google employee could ban you based on personal bias. I'd expect this sort of thing is all kinds of rare though. Main reason why is that the person would be potentially risking a good paying job based on some personal beef. IOW, they could do it, but it seems crazy to consider it.

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
-Hanlon's razor

If a site disappears without good reason from Google, FAR more likely it is do to bad programming of the algo, computer glitch, etc. than someone is out to get the site personally. One of my sites on -sj and -fi at the moment currently is getting the shaft with the anchor text of inbound links for some reason not being credited, as confirmed by an allinanchor search. However, I'm not so paranoid to think this is the result of some sort of personal vendetta. Almost surely an algo bug, or some sort of glitch in Google's computer hardware. I have little doubt that Google has more software bugs than petty, malicious employees. ;)

[GoogleGuy]

There's a very small set of people who have the ability to activate a penalty. There are also internal guidelines and controls in place so that we can trace who activated an penalty. So the short answer to your question is no. But the points raised here are exactly the reasons why we want spamfighting to be as automated as possible--plus computers are happy to work 24-7 without complaining, and it scales better to cover the vastness of the web. :)

[Macguru]

>>There are also internal guidelines

That would be good bedside reading. ;)

[steve128]

Sounds reasonable, but very unlikely.
Similar Q would be, if a google employee likes you (indecent proposal lol) Number#1

To do it it you would need the whole jig-saw not one piece.
+ you would need to see the whole picture, not just a portion of the box, no oops best not say that...