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It happened to my sites. You can remove any site that doesnt have index.html or index.htm. I did it i know.
See, that is from this url: http://services.google.com:8882/urlconsole/controller?cmd=fullStatus
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2004-05-05 07:36:19 GMT :
removal of http://www.microsoft.com/index.html
complete
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I ask google to remove microsoft index.html file. They dont have this file and google removed it after a week.
http://www.google.com/search?q=www%2Emicrosoft%2Ecom
Google also send me this email.
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The following urls/messages have been removed:
www.adobe.com/index.htmlNOINDEX
www.microsoft.com/index.htmlNOINDEX
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Check their PR also.
Be sure that i dint hack any system. Just removed index.html pages. I also removed some more websites. It works.
Just used this: http://services.google.com:8882/urlconsole/controller
with my own email login.
It happened to us, and it may happen again.
That's why Google has to fix this problem.
I told this before on other thread. But everyone thought someone hacked our system. But i didnt need to hack microsoft.com. i just removed their index.html that has never existed.
While the task itself probably only takes a few seconds the bigger the organisation the more months it takes to get a relatively small job looked at even if there is a bit PR disaster at stake.
The fact that sco is still looking around everywhere for it's lost PR suggests that it's not a system wide adjustment Google made; they are doing it on a case by case basis.
I got the sco screenshot. Thanks for the heads-up :)
Looks like Google has responded pretty fast to this.
There must be G employees lurking and leeching here.
-Matt
what about those several innocent medium-sites, which could have been affected
I agree entirely. I belive the only way is for Google to go back, over a period of time and manually check all removal requests, reinstating those that are fraudulent.
I can see no other way but if they did this I can definately see it being a lemons to lemonade public relations campaign for Google.
The bottom line is that all companies have problems but once a problem is brought up how quickly and efficiently they fix is is what matters. We know they have the resource and ability to fix it for the small guys as well as the big guys I just hope they do :)
If it's a manual fix of PR, what about those several innocent medium-sites, which could have been affected, like feelfree's websites?
1) Has Google fixed this so that no more sites without an index.html or index.htm can be removed from the index?
2) If it hasn't been fixed, am I at risk since I use index.php for my homepage?
Or write a script.
For each submitted URL, check to see if it's "[something]/index.htm" or "[something]/index.html". If so, check "[something]" to see if it returns 404. Reverse removal if it does.
I'm pretty sure that Google will find the mistakenly removed URLs pretty quickly. Presumably the removal tool causes URLs to be removed after searching and before printing to the user agent, so Google should be able to put URls back as with microsoft.com and adobe.com.
<added>Hehe thanks Learning Curve, but I think they have more talented people there already!</added>
Why dont you all simply put a index.html with sufficient content which redirects straight to whatever.php or asp. Maybe that would work well...
Originally Posted by lennon7
Why dont you all simply put a index.html with sufficient content which redirects straight to whatever.php or asp.
You shouldn't need to shouldn't need to have an index.html or .htm its just one extra "useless" page on site.
[edited by: Milamber at 4:22 pm (utc) on May 13, 2004]
Hindsight is a wonderful gift for those that have it :)
Find web pages that contain the term "sco.com"
This is a Major Google Bug
Why dont you all simply put a index.html with sufficient content which redirects straight to whatever.php or asp.
In addition to the response by Milamber, you run the risk of Google (and other search engines) inferring that "index.html" is the home page for your site. See the numerous posts about how to do a redirect without losing pagerank as to why that is a problem.
Internal links all go to index.html but default.htm is what you see when you come to mysite.com/
john_k, in fact I've always had an index.html in addition to my default.htm. They are optimised for different spellings of my keyword. Sure, the PR is shared but it's worked out OK for us.
Internal links all go to index.html but default.htm is what you see when you come to mysite.com/
Well that works out okay for you. But other sites that currently have no index.html would be left trying to juggle the two.
Since this is really a side-effect of a hack to protect against a bigger problem, I don't think it pays to go too far down the "what-if" path. Instead, I am hoping that we will hear from Google (soon!) that they are implementing some type of verification process for dropping URLs. Until then though, I will keep the index.html pages with redirects that I put in place right after this thread started!
It is just like all those "press release" allegations that Google is alleged to have "censored" this story, or that story, when in fact, they just zap alot of the obvious spam stories. Yet out there on the web are dozens of articles about how Google "censored" their personal pet project that was going to save the whales and fix the hole in the ozone.
There are a few blogs that have picked it up, but nothing even we would feel comfortable quoting here. (especially those that didn't include a link to the source)
It's gotten very little press from what I've seen.
An apology and a statement from google is in order.
Let sleeping dogs lie? ;)
Whoever it is from Google who lurks here forgot to repair sco's PR.
Maybe, it is a manual penalty. ;)
SN
Where is the best place to report it?
Originally posted by mvl22
Where is the best place to report it?
