TechWag

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After a while you get really tired of dealing with companies that literally hold you at hostage, and again with Google, we find ourselves banned from the Google index again, this time for cloaking. The only problem, there isn’t any cloaking going on, and Google while an important chunk of traffic is quickly becoming irrelevant in light of what traffic I get from social media.

We got this really nice polite letter from Google this morning:

Dear site owner or webmaster of techwag.com,

While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages were using techniques that are outside our quality guidelines, which can be found here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769&hl=en. This appears to be because your site has been modified by a third party. Typically, the offending party gains access to an insecure directory that has open permissions. Many times, they will upload files or modify existing ones, which then show up as spam in our index.

We detected cloaking on your site and suspect this is the cause. For example at http://techwag.com/index.phP we found:

Redacted – it was a long list of crappy words that we don’t use here

For more information about what cloaking is, visit http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66355&hl=en.

In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from techwag.com are scheduled to be removed temporarily from our search results for at least 30 days.

We would prefer to keep your pages in Google’s index. If you wish to be reconsidered, please correct or remove all pages (may not be limited to the examples provided) that are outside our quality guidelines. One potential remedy is to contact your web host technical support for assistance. For more information about security for webmasters, see http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/04/my-sites-been-hacked-now-what.html. When such changes have been made, please visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?hl=en to learn more and submit your site for reconsideration.

Sincerely, Google Search Quality Team

After a quick review of the source code (thinking that this was yet another word press hack, some bug we didn’t know about) we didn’t find anything, not even a 0×0 gif with a link to anything after spidering the whole site. We then use the Best SEO Toolkit to see if they could find any evidence of cloaking, and they didn’t see it either.

So again, out of Google for the next 30 days, only this time it is not because of a Word press hack, it is because someone over at Google can’t get it together. Which is annoying, but becoming far too common in my experience with Google, I did ok without Google for six months waiting for them to get it all fixed and all together after the word press hack in April, and I was actually beginning to like Google again.

This time I think I am done, when the random act of a large company can literally take me off the face of the planet, I need a better way to compete. You know, with Hadoop, Heritrix, and mapreduce, I can make a jack leg web crawler really quickly, with Amazon Web Services I can host that puppy and expand or contract at will. With the information I can get I can sell advertising, I can host e-mail, really, short of having a shiny PHD mathematician (which I can get once I start making money) and some serious press, tying into the “real time web” and making a better mouse trap. This would not be hard, just need to get a good Word of Mouth processing going like Google had in the first place, and making it all work.

Maybe it is time, if I am going to continually have issues with someone, anyone, a company, maybe it is time to move on, stop sweating it, and just walk away. Some relationships are too expensive, and my relationship with Google has definitely hit rock bottom.

Tags: google, web master, tools, notice, index, gone, later, bye bye, crud