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Google ban themselves again
By Adam C | February 12, 2009
A fun story caught my eye today as Google penalised themselves for buying links.
This story in itself is well worth a wry chuckle, though what difference a PageRank penalty is going to make to the worlds biggest search engine, I don’t know. In my old age I can sympathise with Google; it must be difficult though keeping everyone on message in a company that must employ tens of thousands worldwide.
But the fact that they’re massive - and the unofficial author of “What Is and Isn’t Acceptable in SEO” available now at all good bookshops - means every now and then its acceptable to point and laugh. Which brings me onto the reason I’ve decided to post again after several months in the wilderness.
You see, this isn’t the first time that Google have had to take action against themselves for black-hat SEO…
Back in 2005 I stumbled upon some fishy looking (read: keyword-stuffed) Google <title> tags that were only showing the SERP’s and not the browser.
A quick post to Threadwatch (R.I.P.) later, which Nick W expertly re-positioned resulting in a Slashdotting and all kinds of attention. Before long GoogleGuy - the name used by Matt Cutts at the time and possibly some other Google reps - posted an explanation on WebmasterWorld.
Hey everyone, I’m sorry that it took me a while to post about this. I wanted to make sure I completely understood what was going on first.
Those pages were primarily intended for the Google Search Appliances that do site search on individual help center pages. For example, http://adwords.google.com/support has a search box, and that search is powered by a Google Search Appliance. In order to help the Google Search Appliance find answers to questions, the user support system checked for the user agent of “Googlebot” (the Google Search Appliance uses “Googlebot” as a user agent), and if it found it, it added additional information from the user support database into the title.
The issue is that in addition to being accessed via the internal site-search at each help center, these pages can be accessed by static links via the web. When the web-crawl Googlebot visits, the user support system thinks that it’s the Google Search Appliance (the code only checks for “Googlebot”) and adds these additional keywords.
That’s the background, so let me talk about what we’re doing. To be consistent with our guidelines, we’re removing these pages from our index. I think the pages are already gone from most of our data centers–a search like [site:google.com/support] didn’t return any of these pages when I checked. Once the pages are fully changed, people will have to follow the same procedure that anyone else would (email webmaster at google.com with the subject “Reinclusion request” to explain the situation).
Maybe the cast iron truth. Irrelevant really. We all had fun for a couple of weeks - as was the way at Threadwatch - whilst Google did the honourable thing and banned themselves.
May 4th, 2009 at 6:06 pm
interesting and amusing stuff Adam, get in touch via linkedin, would be good to catch up