Google: We Are Not Censoring The Syrian Arab News Agency

Sep 17, 2013 - 8:32 am 5 by
Filed Under Google

The Syrian Arab News Agency LogoThe Syrian Arab News Agency doesn't show up in Google when you search for [Syrian Arab News Agency] but it does come up in Bing when you search for [Syrian Arab News Agency].

Why? Is Google censoring the Syrian news web site because of what is going on between the United States of America and Syria? Nah.

Google's Distinguished Engineer, Matt Cutts, spotted the rumors in a Hacker News thread and said Google is absolutely not blocking or censoring the The Syrian Arab News Agency. In fact, he said since August, Google has had a hard to indexing the site, as if The Syrian Arab News Agency is maybe blocking Google intentionally or unintentionally.

Matt Cutts said in the thread:

I asked the crawl/indexing team about this, and it looks like sana.sy hasn't let Google crawl the site since August. It's unclear whether it's deliberate vs. something like timeouts. So it's nothing on Google's side. No webspam-related issues or anything like that, either.

Why is Bing and DuckDuckGo able to index the site? That is a good question. It makes me think that the agency specifically is blocking Google and not other search engines.

Matt Cutts did add:

In fact, if sana.sy were to register for Google's free webmaster console at google.com/webmasters/ , then they would have gotten automatic alert emails regarding the high level of errors we get when trying to crawl the site.

Here is a screen shot of Google's search results for the agency's name:

The Syrian Arab News Agency In Google

Here is a screen shot of Bing's search results for the agency's name:

The Syrian Arab News Agency in Bing

Forum discussion at Hacker News.

 

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