Admin

Hacker gets prominent evolution archive booted from Google Index
December 4, 2006 @ 2:07:14 PM
By Nate Anderson

Webmasters aren't pleased when they run into problems with Google, and Wesley Elsberry was no exception. Elsberry, the webmaster of the Talk.Origins archive, made his displeasure public in a blog post after Google booted his site from their search index. This sort of thing happens frequently, but a public response from Google is uncommon, and it sheds some light on how Google handles its relationships with webmasters.

It's also a great example of how far you'll get with a problem if you call Google on the phone. Talk.Origins is devoted to discussions of evolution and the perceived shortcomings of the Intelligent Design and creationist movements. The group behind Talk.Origins runs several websites, one of which was hacked on November 18. The hacker added a collection of invisible spam links to certain webpages, links that dealt mostly with the less-pleasant sides of human sexual experience.

Google's algorithms noticed the spammy links within a few days and delisted the site from the Google Index for 60 days. Elsberry was angry that he wasn't notified in advance of this decision, and claimed that Google even refused to tell him what the problem was. "So, what, precisely, was causing Google to not like us anymore?" he writes. "The essential lesson here is that Google would not tell us. That isn't mere caprice; that is Google policy."

Elsberry's attempts to get access to a Real Live Human™ on the phone proved fruitless as well, but he reports that he luckily found and fixed the problem quickly. After the story was posted on Slashdot, Google's Matt Cutts investigated the issue and wrote a blog post of his own, outlining the steps that Google had taken. By November 27th, the site was listed as "hacked and spammy" and was flagged as "penalized."