And there’s no information anywhere I can find out why, nor any instructions on how to fix it.

Thanks for the good and necessary blog, and I’m so glad to see that Google/Matt Cutts actually responded to you, since your site HAS been around forever and has provided a great service (I recall reading it way bay when).

http://wiki.apache.org/nutch/
http://search.wikia.com/wiki/Search_Wikia

Why don’t you read the reply at Matt Cutt’s blog? If you had, you would know that not only did I read it, but I was an active participant in the comments on that thread. Also, you might have read Matt’s comment there saying that he agreed with some of my points…

I think that will do. The New Year approaches, and I would prefer to have the old one pass with a smaller serving of vitriol than a larger.

Why don’t you read google’s rely about this situation:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-google-handles-hacked-sites/

1) They did try an email you

2) They reported the problem in their webmaster control panel.

Seriously if you get hacked and have NO idea 10 days later you are an idiot and should take your web server and throw it out the window.

A bad webmaster / system admin should know about and be able to resolve any attack in less then one hour, I can’t believe you are complaining so much about it. Its your fault, and Google tried to help you, even then you where too dumb to get it!

I get tired of cry babies like you on the internet.

I’m a bit sad to see that some people are rude with the owner the cracked web site. If you put one instant in the place of someone who has to have such cracking situation, you’ll see it’s not a typical situation and it’s definitively difficult to deal with.

Please let’s consider that there’s no system that is secured at 100% and a team of motivated and patient crackers will certainly be able to crack any popular systems.

I know what I’m talking about as I was formally a IT Architect & Security consultant for years and I was the guy who had to design and put in place in 2000 the Secure and Private Internet Services of S.W.I.F.T. (http://www.swift.com). S.W.I.F.T. is the institution that requires a high level of security as they have to be the telecommunication infrastructure providers for all bank in the world to exchange banking message (the famous SWIFT BIC ID/CODE).

So everybody may be in the mercy of a cracking. Even Google is not imunized again cracking:
For instance: http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,127454-page,1-c,google/article.html
BTW: Strange URL: http://www.google.com/intl/xx-hacker

Now if we come back to this discussion on this blog.

I think Austringer is among the priviligied ones were alerted (or should have been if he was really alerted) when his web site has been blocked from Google index.

I don’t want to cover the exact reason but at least I want to point out that I used to get some web pages delisted from Google and I was never alerted about that. It’s not an isolated case.

So for my part, the real issue I’d like to talk is more about the reason why the Google Webmaster service alerts some people when their web site were penalized but not others.

I used to get some of my web pages excluded by Google index. I was never alerted by Google Webmaster service.

When I tried to understand what’s going on with the Google Webmaster tool, I just have the message that stated my web sites is not indexed by Google; which is a little bit limited and didn’t give me any clues of the reason.

Of course, I have to analyze what happened during the last couple of days and to conclude myself that the web page was removed because I did some 3-4 promotions through some hi-PR web sites and/or because I’ve submitted to several directories within a short time. OK I understand I may have gone against some Google T&C by doing some white hat promotional activities and I assumed the consequenced of being delisted for some web pages.

However, even if I don’t expect the exact reason to be given by the alert for the penalty, it would be so helpful and useful that I could have been alerted by just a simple message about my web penality or blocked.

Unfortunately, the real thing is Google Webmaster tool doesn’t send the message about penality at least to me and same of several of my friends.

It’s very frustrating and after such things happen more than once, some of friends finally asked my help to develop a kind of monitoring to check the existence of a specific web site in Google index, a cron task that is scheduled every 15 minutes.

Sure we’re not alone to be obliged to do so. It’s the natural way of adaptation. It’s just about creating some comfortable ways to ease the life of webmasters. If Google doesn’t give that, we’ll build it ourselves.

So to come back to the main question, why don’t you systematically alert the web site ownership (e-mail registered and ownership approved) when there’s a penalty that happens and the web site or some web pages are removed.

Thanks.

VK