Google dropped this site

May 6, 2005 11:32 AM

A friend of mine has a little page where he sells books and stuff. He says it used to come up in Google, but no more. Yahoo finds it. It's a free site that came with his internet account, I think. Why did Google lose it? Is it just that Google is blocking these personal sites from this provider, cox.net?
posted by wsg to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Google made some updates to the way PageRank works over the past few days to combat some of the black-hat PageRank exploits. Probably has something to do with that.

If you download the Google toolbar, and vist your friend's site, it'll tell you the PageRank. If the PageRank is 0, then it got nuked in the update.
posted by SweetJesus at 11:55 AM on May 6, 2005

My site still comes up on Google. I have Cox.
posted by knave at 12:18 PM on May 6, 2005

Is there a way to obtain the page rank of a page w/o installing Google toolbar?
posted by xmutex at 12:44 PM on May 6, 2005

Here is the google Webmaster's FAQ page on "My web pages used to be listed and now they aren't."

RE: finding your pagerank w/o installing the googlebar, you can try this page, but who knows if it's legit. There is also a firefox extension for it, but if you are going to do that, just get the googlebar.
posted by misterbrandt at 12:53 PM on May 6, 2005

semi-related story on Boing-Boing
posted by jacobsee at 1:38 PM on May 6, 2005