

Ask HN: Why is Google purging all search results for Syrian Arab News Agency? - teamgb

The website sana.sy of the Syrian Arab News Agency has been &#x27;censored&#x27; or &#x27;purged&#x27; from Google search results.  Even after clicking through 10 pages of results, not a single one links to Sana.sy. Contrast with the results from DuckDuckGo and Bing where it&#x27;s the top result.<p>Google: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=syrian+arab+news+agency<p>DuckDuckGo: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;duckduckgo.com&#x2F;?q=syrian+arab+news+agency<p>Bing: http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bing.com&#x2F;search?q=syrian+arab+news+agency<p>This test was conducted based on a post about the Syrian War (http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.moonofalabama.org&#x2F;2013&#x2F;09&#x2F;a-short-history-of-the-war-on-syria-2006-2014.html#more) which has been posted on HN here (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6387286).
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lcedp
Technically it's not purged, 178000 pages are in index:
[https://www.google.com/search?q=site:sana.sy](https://www.google.com/search?q=site:sana.sy)

Perhaps they're downranked, but anyway the first two links on your link leads
to wikipedia and facebook pages of that agency which both has direct link to
the site in question.

[http://sana.sy/robots.txt](http://sana.sy/robots.txt) \- oops, no robots.txt.
Maybe it's just a results of poor SEO.

~~~
diziet
Not having robots.txt just results in Google defaulting to their reasonable
crawl settings. For most sites, a hastily configured robots.txt usually
results in problems rather than SEO help.

The indexed pages are also missing most of the 'important' landing pages and
other big pages, so most likely some sort of automated spam detection was
triggered.

My ISP seems to time out on the domain, sshing and curling from various
servers returns the page.

~~~
lcedp
Just saying, the absence of `robots.txt` can be sign of not really caring
about SEO.

------
mschuster91
To quote from the Wikipedia article about SANA:

    
    
      Up until November 2012, SANA's website was hosted in Dallas, Texas by the United States company SoftLayer. Due to sanctions related to the Syrian civil war, which make this hosting illegal, the SoftLayer company was obliged to terminate its hosting responsibilities with SANA.
    

I have no idea about the exact legal powers of international (unilateral?)
sanctions in the US, but is it possible that Google de-listed SANA because of
legal issues?

~~~
chrismcb
I'm curious what sanctions prevent hosting a Syrian website?
[http://damascus.usembassy.gov/sanctions-
syr.html](http://damascus.usembassy.gov/sanctions-syr.html) claims there are
only 3 sanctions: No US goods(basically) can be exported to Syria, something
against the commercial bank, and denying Syria access to the US financial
system.

~~~
mschuster91
How can you host a website without paying for it? Just like fighting against
"pirate" websites, just in reverse this time.

------
Matt_Cutts
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.

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.

------
ghostdiver
Technically it may be purged by blackhat SEO, because google search result
ranking algorithm is poor actually and can be easily gamed by anyone who has
100 dollars in her pocket.

Only because Bing/DDG SERPs were not gamed by "SEO" activity doesn't mean it
can't be done and/or those SEs algos are any better than Googles.

------
300
I think it's obvious. That's our reality unfortunately.

~~~
shawnz
As far as I know, this is an unprecedented action for Google in the US. Just
because it fits your narrative does not make it obvious!

~~~
gscott
I have a website where not only did Google remove it, they removed all pages
that linked to it, and all future pages that linked to it. You could search on
the domain and get zero results. So they have the capability to do anything.
(The website is a DMV licensed traffic school for traffic tickets). The
website doesn't have to be anything too special for them to purge it.

~~~
KingdomSprite
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that there's more to the story than
what you have stated. There are numerous reasons why your site may have been
removed. It could have been shady SEO tactics such as link building or invalid
meta data, which is a big no no for Google. Should definitely check your
Google Webmaster Tools to see what's up.

~~~
gscott
It was a classic I bought about 20 links. But as soon as the webspam action
happened I removed them (through text-link-ads.com). I was on top of it and
cleaned it up but I have 3 times resubmitted it for re-approval over 1.5 years
now with no luck.

I broke the rules but Viagra sites get better treatment.

The problem was that 80% of the customers came from lists given out by
courthouses. Customers would type in the web address into Google search
instead of the address bar.

Once the website disappeared from the Internet the only way customers could
find the site was by Google adwords which went from spending $150 a day to
$500 a day. A total win for Google I guess!

It was impossible to spend $500 a day forever, I put the website (the same
website, no changes) onto a new domain and now it spends about $200 a day in
Google adwords. Much better. I seemed to have received the worst possible
webspam action for really very little. Consider other site buy thousands of
links.. my 20 links were small potatoes that I thought would fly under the
radar.

The whole incident cost about $100,000+ in sales mostly from customers who if
they just knew how to use the address bar would have made it to the website.

When I see other websites have issues with Google, I know it doesn't take a
whole lot to bring a great deal of Google issues upon them. Google if they
wants to can just remove them or send them to page 200 and since Google gets
80% or so of searches and people don't know how to use the address bar the
website is going to have to buy Adwords in order to stay online or change
domains (assuming it is not an on-page issue).

