After 40,000+ pageviews and several inbound links, my posting here a couple of days ago entitled "Has Google gone MAD?" managed to plant itself in some very high positions in Google search results, including the #1 spot for the search term "Google gone mad" - which I thought was quite neat:
This evening, however, I went to show somebody that I was, in fact, top of the search results for "Google gone mad" - only to find that I wasn't. I hunted through the first couple of pages... no sign of my blog... I went through the entire top hundred - and still nothing. Then I searched for the entry directly by URL - and sure enough, it's not there.
I can only surmise that it's been removed from the Google index because it's been detected by Googlebomb prevention systems - gaining several inbound links and shooting to the #1 spot within a few short hours does seem somewhat suspicious, I guess.
This does, however, seem like something which could all to easily be abused; if people could previously perform googlebombs such as the infamous George W. Bush "miserable failure" bomb, surely it wouldn't be hard for people with malicious intent to similarly bomb a 3rd party's website, thus getting it completely removed from Google's index. The impact is not as high as it could be, since it only seems to affect the single URL, not the entire domain; however I think it quite likely that there's some kind of threshold at which the entire site would be blocked, i.e. after a certain number of bombs on the one site, it would be assumed that the entire site is up to no good.
Update (16 January):
This evening, I checked again, and found that my top position has been reinstated. This leaves me wondering quite what has been happening...
Update (21 January):
For the past few days, I seem to have lost the top spot again (for "google gone mad") - I can't find this site anywhere in the first few pages of results. However, it does seem to be top for "google gone mad techblog" - so it's back in the index, but has completely lost its ranking for "google gone mad" - which seems to indicate that this effect could still be used to kill specific keywords / key phrases for any given website.
Update:
My blog seems to have settled again in top spot for the original phrase "Google gone mad" - so perhaps the detection systems respond to the new link rate dropping by slowly returning the page's rankings. Sustained new link generation, on the other hand, could possibly keep a page out of the rankings on a more long-term basis; however if the rate is calculated based on number of unique websites (rather than webpages) which link to the site, it may prove difficult to sustain the required rate.
This evening, however, I went to show somebody that I was, in fact, top of the search results for "Google gone mad" - only to find that I wasn't. I hunted through the first couple of pages... no sign of my blog... I went through the entire top hundred - and still nothing. Then I searched for the entry directly by URL - and sure enough, it's not there.
I can only surmise that it's been removed from the Google index because it's been detected by Googlebomb prevention systems - gaining several inbound links and shooting to the #1 spot within a few short hours does seem somewhat suspicious, I guess.
This does, however, seem like something which could all to easily be abused; if people could previously perform googlebombs such as the infamous George W. Bush "miserable failure" bomb, surely it wouldn't be hard for people with malicious intent to similarly bomb a 3rd party's website, thus getting it completely removed from Google's index. The impact is not as high as it could be, since it only seems to affect the single URL, not the entire domain; however I think it quite likely that there's some kind of threshold at which the entire site would be blocked, i.e. after a certain number of bombs on the one site, it would be assumed that the entire site is up to no good.
Update (16 January):
This evening, I checked again, and found that my top position has been reinstated. This leaves me wondering quite what has been happening...
Update (21 January):
For the past few days, I seem to have lost the top spot again (for "google gone mad") - I can't find this site anywhere in the first few pages of results. However, it does seem to be top for "google gone mad techblog" - so it's back in the index, but has completely lost its ranking for "google gone mad" - which seems to indicate that this effect could still be used to kill specific keywords / key phrases for any given website.
Update:
My blog seems to have settled again in top spot for the original phrase "Google gone mad" - so perhaps the detection systems respond to the new link rate dropping by slowly returning the page's rankings. Sustained new link generation, on the other hand, could possibly keep a page out of the rankings on a more long-term basis; however if the rate is calculated based on number of unique websites (rather than webpages) which link to the site, it may prove difficult to sustain the required rate.
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