Confirmation of Google Bug Released

May 14, 2004 - 3:29 pm 0 — by
Filed Under Google News

Yesterday, when I announced a thread at WebmasterWorld on a bug on Google where people were able to remove Web site's homepages, I later received many unfriendly responses. I won't name the people who gave me a really hard time about releasing this information, instead I will prove that the information at WebmasterWorld and the evidence I provided were indeed accurate.

According to Danny Sullivan's article released today, Google said this news was TRUE.

"We can confirm that less than 10 websites were inadvertently removed from Google's index for several hours [Thursday]. All of these sites have been restored and are accessible through a Google search. The removal occurred as the result of an outside attempt to abuse Google's automated web page removal tool -- a free service we provide webmasters who would like to remove web pages they own from Google's index. Upon discovering this bug, we fixed it immediately. We will also perform a thorough analysis to ensure additional web pages were not inappropriately removed."

Danny, thank you for posting this information.

 

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