Banished

Hi Nick,

I am from Google's web search team. It looks like your site was removed because it has been hacked. We tried to send you an email last Friday with information on what happened, but it was difficult to find a contact. Full details are in our webmaster console which can be found at http://google.com/webmasters. You also now have my email address and I can share more details with you directly.

Could be because you don't have a robots.txt file ... Try that.

Google webmaster tools can help you out with that: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools

Greg, Thanks for your note. I checked the message on the webmasters site but didn't see the evidence described therein. I actually didn't get your email address, so can you drop me a note at [removed]. Thanks. Nick

I can believe it was 'hacked' -- which in this context might mean had dangerous content inserted -- but it must be pretty minor.

I'm visiting the site in Google Chrome right now, and I thought Chrome offered 'Safe Browsing' warnings equivalent to those that sometimes appear in Google results.

OK. The problem seems to have been resolved, thanks to Google's helpful Greg Grothaus. What happened was that there were some hidden spam links (to various lame mp3 and lyrics pages) at the bottom of the index page of an old blog I had called Rough Sort that's been dormant for a couple of years (it was set up as a separate Movable Type blog but within the Rough Type domain). I don't know how the links got there, but apparently it may have been through sort of hackery. Anyway, I rebuilt the page, the offending links disappeared, and now Google says I'm once gain fit for consumption. I should come back into existence in the next few days. Whew.

Oh...blank nick .... nick becomes a blank.... but isn't that supposed to happen to all middle aged punks 20 minutes into the future?

Nick, if you don't start posting more often your readers are going to encourage Google in this :)

Hi Nick, just checking the next morning and it looks like you've got 1000+ pages back in Google's index. Thanks for taking care of the hacked pages.

>> here were some hidden spam links
>> (to various lame mp3 and lyrics pages)

I still don't understand; lots of pages have links to mp3 file and lyric pages in them. Were the G-men going though every top level domain, doing a recursive depth first search looking for unlicensed content links and then, if found, flagging the domain so that they were not visible in the site index? Is Google now the Internet police scanning every page for well formed HTML and not indexing them if they don't meet Google's standard of perfection? There's got to be a more to this: is this an undocumented feature or a bug?

Well, since the era of IT innovation is "over," I don't know why you would expect this web site to function smoothly!

Michele:

>>since the era of IT innovation is "over,"

"The first time you do something its science. The second time its engineering. The third time its just being a technician." -- priceless quote from Clifford Stoll: 18 minutes with an agile mind

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