Google Won't Say Why It De-indexed Talk.Origins

J. J. Ramsey writes: "Talk.Origins is an archive with thousands of pages exposing creationist pseudoscience. Rather mysteriously, Google pulled the plug on its search engine, only giving the vague reason: "No pages from your site are currently included in Google's index due to violations of the webmaster guidelines." This may have been triggered by a recent cracking of the site that added "hidden links to non-topical sites," but curiously enough, Google won't say just what the violations were. As Wesley R. Elsberry, put it, "My mission, whether I liked it or not, was to find and fix whatever problem the TOA [Talk.Origins Archive] might have, with no guidance as to what the problem was and nothing at all about where to start looking.... I was extremely lucky. The damage to my site was limited and in the first place that I happened to look. Other honest webmasters might not be so lucky. They may have to undertake an arduous process of vetting pages, essentially having to second-guess the mind of the cracker in trying to locate a problem that Google knows the exact location of." This was probably a bad decision on Google's part, since Talk.Origins moved its business to Yahoo!. Oops.

Hat tip to blogger Larry Moran."