Google Delists Even Its Own Employees' Websites

Google has been under a lot of pressure and scrutiny as it dominance in search and other fields has grown. While the company ensures everyone its practices are legit, with so much power, many, including government regulators, are wondering if Google doesn't abuse its position. The story of one Google employee should shed some light on how Google handles things, even though it probably won't sway anyone one way or the other.

Google's search engine is the biggest in the world and plenty of websites depend in great deal on the traffic it provides. So when something goes wrong, a site suddenly goes down in the ranking or is de-listed altogether, you can be sure that people aren't going to like it. But, while there are plenty who would rather come up with all sorts of conspiracy theories and convince themselves that, somehow, Google has taken a personal vendetta against their small cooking blog, most often than not the fault lies with the website owner and not the search engine.

Case in point is the personal blog of Google Jason Morrison, a search quality engineer no less, which started gradually being removed from the Google search results in the past month. It took him a while to realize it, but after he did, he set out to investigate what had happened.

It turns out there was indeed a problem and Google wasn't to blame for the issue. By his own account, Morrison's blog had a traffic limit set up with his web host and that limit had been reached. This prevented the Google indexer from crawling the site, and after a few days of errors, the algorithm determined that the site was no longer available so it started removing it from the results.

Morrison fixed the problem using the plain old Webmasters Tools to diagnose it and find a solution. The issue itself is rather trivial and is most likely very common just because of the sheer number of websites out there. But the thing to take away is that, when something like this happens, chances are it's the webmasters fault and not Google's. Also, Google doesn't do any favors even to its own employees. [via TechDirt]