Adobe? Never heard of them says Google

Just a small, and mostly fixed glitch, but it looks like some bright spark webmasters found a way to exploit an overly-trusting Google to automatically remove someone from the search results if you search for their domain.

If the site in question doesn't have have an index.html or index.htm page at the root level, asking for these pages to be removed results in the domain getting the dread PageRank 0 penalty on its homepage, and a null results page when you search for the domain.

Naturally amongst the first targets were Microsoft and SCO, and at the time of writing a search for "www.adobe.com" will elicit a mere shrug of Google's mighty shoulders...

Posted by Martin Belam, May 14, 2004    
Read the latest posts about: Google, Search
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