(2)
Besides for Google leaving out the American flag on their July Fourth logo, which I honestly don't feel is a big deal anyway, Google has delisted usa.com from the search results over the Fourth of July weekend.
A search for any pages on the usa.com domain returns nothing found in Google.
The owner of USA.com posted a complaint about the site being penalized in the Google Webmaster Help forums over the July Fourth weekend.
Truth is, the site was originally not in Google's index because it was a parked domain site. Then these guys took over the domain and put up some public content that is available on other sites. Google relisted the domain back in April, around tax season. But a couple weeks ago, Google delisted the domain again.
The webmaster is seeking advice as to why and he did this over the July Fourth weekend.
Personally, to me the site looks like a site designed specifically to rank well in search engines. I did not take a deep look to see if anything the site was doing was outside of Google's guidelines. The webmaster did admit:
Initially, we thought that it was because travel.usa.com had duplication content. Therefore, we removed all the links form www.USA.com to travel.usa.com and sent reconsideration request. However, yesterday, we were told that “The site (www.usa.com) still have violations” via webmaster tools message.
He is not sure what the issue is but hopes to get an answer over America's birthday.
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.
Comments:
Green Mart
07/04/2011 11:40 pm
Evil things
Ahmed Kazikian
07/05/2011 03:50 am
My question is why is there a Japanese flag in the 4th of July Doodle?! Ok, ok, I know it's really a baseball against a red background. But did no one at Google think it looked maybe too similar to be appropriate? And nothing against Japan, it just made me do a WTF when I loaded Google just now.