Isnt this a bit odd? There will be several hundred searches per month on Google by people searching for the site. A quick look at the Overture UK suggestion tool shows 753 searches for "toxic lemon" last month.
I guess that they annoyed Google, like Search King did, but it seems that google should at least keep the front page in. This is a hand deletion if ever I saw one.
Toxic Lemon could have blocked Googlebot via robots.txt or the server could have been down for an extended period over the holiday.
Most like it is Google removing sites that are displaying search results from their competitors. I have heard of a number of sites disappearing without trace just recently, it is unlikely to be a coincidence.
Inktomi are also deliberately blocking "competitors" now, which I found out a few days ago.
The site was there to do a specific job, it did it very well, it was only ever going to be short term.
To try and spin this as big bad Google stomping its competitors does us all a dis-service. There may come a time when G needs to be called to account, crying wolf now will not help that process.
It would be silly to suggest that Google see Toxic Lemon or any other small UK search engine as genuine competition. However, they may see companies like Overture, Espotting, Webfinder and Mirago as genuine competitors in the UK. Infospace is actually a Google partner, rather than competitor, which makes the Toxic Lemon move slightly unusual, if not unexpected.
More traffic for Brett now ;)
Eliteweb, the IP range wasn't blocked, nor was the site down. I believe that it is a content issue and that the site has been deliberately removed. As NFFC says, this is not entirely unexpected.
Remember when the Yahoo directory was hailed as _the_ authority site for searchers, because it listed all of their competitors large and small?
There are plenty of sites out there that do what Toxic-Lemon do (Linking to their own (well not really own - but you know what I mean) serps) - I wonder if Toxic-Lemon just pushed it to far (I think they had over 100,000 pages of serps listed.) and eventually got noticed by Google quality control.
Is it worth being on Toxic Lemon anyway?
Not as much as it was
Hopefully TL will have grown a large enough userbase to see through this glitch. I also hope that it was temporary because the TL meta search gave a good spread of results.
If Yahoo started to link to its own serps such as:-
htt*p://search.yahoo.com/search?p=webmasterworld&ei=UTF-8&fr=fp-tab-web-t&cop=mss&tab=
But doing a mod rewrite so that the url was more Search Engine friendly then it could be comparable.
Even so plenty of others do the same as TL.
ncw164x
How strange.
Nowt wrong with those - IMHO if you remove someone like TL - then you need to remove every other 2/3rd level search engine with over 20,000 pages set up for the SERPS
Now that would open up Google to a lot of very crap results and odd information floating around IMO.
TL is quite a good site anyways - at least you get what you're looking for - unlike some other affiliate sites that have recently appeared.
There are plenty of sites out there that do what Toxic-Lemon do (Linking to their own (well not really own - but you know what I mean) serps)
This could be the start of a move by Google to remove webpages that are mainly serps. These dynamically generated pages are the equivalent of search index pollution for any search engine operator. Whether it is exploiting a flaw in SE design or taking advantage of how SEs work is open to question. However A lot of small sites are using these serp filled pages to make money from advertising and affiliate deals.
Regards...jmcc
Yeeha TL is back! Nice one
Tinky Winky - did you get your site back too?
Does anyone have any inside info on what G are playing at?
nope! not a sign....I did get an email back from google saying read the guidelines *cheers guys - hadn;t thought of that one then!*
Never mind (*GULP*) just as well the old adage that having all your eggs in one basket is not something I do!
Cheers
TW
Tinky Winky - na having eggs in one basket is never a good idea is it. We lost a 2 year old city site which had absolutely 100% genuine content and no spam whatsoever. Luckily we had other sites to back it up. A real shame though because people liked the site and even phoned us to ask questions about that city! Worse still we made money from it!
Maybe you should get on the horler to the CEO of Google and ask him over to London? ;-)
(edited poor spellin)
Ditto. Personally - I think this whole thread is nothing more than a url/promotion drop.
Google accidently dropping that site was probably the best thing that ever happened to it.
nothing more than a url/promotion drop
Not sure about that - why tell everyone how you f***ed up so that all other competitors can benefit from your new found knowledge? That's what stickmail's for?
Promotion or dropping your url - everyone here (virtually) has their own sites and their own struggles with google et al and getting seen. I doubt any of us would switch away to use TL apart from seeing all the good things that were being done.
Having said all of that - nothing's changed anyway!
Also, there is no way that it was an accident. Others here who have looked at this will confirm that. It is worth discussing because many of us here have been waiting for Google to start making moves in the UK to hurt the competition (Overture and Espotting). If something happens, I want to know about it, and I suspect that others do as well. I notice a good number of long time members posting in this thread, so there is obviously some genuine interest.
[edited by: IanTurner at 7:28 pm (utc) on Dec. 30, 2003]
[edit reason] Unecessary addition [/edit]
