A number of conservative websites have been slamming Google lately — it started with Google’s foray into China, but has ranged from Google’s removing sites from its Google News service because they ran racist anti-Muslim screeds to rumors that Google is a major source of funding for MoveOn.Org.
But the anti-Google screed that takes the cake is Glenn Reynolds’ pimping of Dan Riehl’s anti-Google screed.
Riehl is angry that Google removed his site from its index. Riehl simply lies about that de-listing in the post that Reynolds links to (emphasis added),
After a month of hearing nothing from Google, I emailed them a post from Instapundit today. I also wrote that if they were smart they would understand that in order for their newer products to take hold, they needed early adopters – precisely the kind of people they are consistently ticking off due to little if any real customer service. So, after a month of nothing, imagine my surprise, they pick today, after my nth email with Glenn’s post included, to respond.
Hi Dan,
Thank you for your note. Your page has been blocked from our index because it does not meet the quality standards necessary to assign accurate PageRank. We cannot comment on the individual reasons your page was removed. However, certain actions such as cloaking, writing text in such a way that it can be seen by search engines but not by users, or setting up pages/links with the sole purpose of fooling search engines may result in permanent removal from our index. Please read our Webmaster Guidelines at
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769 for more information.Thank you for taking the time to write.
Regards,
The Google TeamThat’s a non-answer. I’ve done none of those things. I have no hidden links, couldn’t create blind text if I wanted to – and previously have offered to correct anything necessary, if only I knew what it was. I don’t and apparently never will, thanks to Google. And public relations like this is going to leave their new initiatives in the basement where they belong.
In fact, of course, Riehl allowed search engine spammers to create thousands of junk subdomains like this one which is still up and working as of May 29, 2006.
Frankly, I don’t think Google has done enough to deal with the search engine spam problem, especially from its own Blogger service, but I’ll leave it to Dan and Glenn to argue that Google’s being heavy-handed in blocking a domain that was hosting thousands of search engine spam pages.