The Elephant in the Room: Google Monoculture

Re:The Elephant in the Room: Google Monoculture by bdfh42 on Monday February 09, 2009 @10:48AM (#473584)

My brother has a site that has just gone dark on Google. This is a site that uses no SEO "techniques" - it's just a plain site with content and a form to buy a product (not software) that actually uses Google's own "Checkout". Oddly, it turns up OK on Google's image search but never makes it into the regular key word search results.

Obviously, investigations are on-going but it is a worrying that a site supporting a legitimate commercial venture should just disappear from Google and thus (in effect) from the Internet.

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Re:The Elephant in the Room: Google Monoculture by andreyf on Monday February 09, 2009 @06:05PM (#474342)

This happens randomly. My Rutgers site (one page, edu domain), was de-listed for a couple of weeks (didn't exist, even when I specified "site:rutgers.edu"), then just re-appeared. I also noticed this with Oliver Steele's functional.js page - I was used to typing "functional js" into Google to find it, and at one point, it disappeared for a week or two from ranking alltogether, only to mysterious re-appear again.

Maybe it's some clever way to check whether or not people track their SEO? De-list sites, and watch if the person reverts to an earlier version of the page, or submits it for Google to crawl?

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Re:The Elephant in the Room: Google Monoculture by jacquesm on Monday February 09, 2009 @11:37AM (#473677)

Maybe that's googles' subtle way of telling your brother to buy some advertising with them ?

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