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EMAIL FROM ADAM, GOOGLE SEARCH QUALITY TEAM, TO CHARLES CARREONDATED AUGUST 29, 2007 |
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Google Watch, by
google-watch.org
-----Original Message----- Dear Charles, I'm one of the members of the Search
Quality Team and your concerns regarding American-buddha.com were
escalated to me. I wanted to respectfully clarify some of
the technical issues regarding our removal of your site from our index
and also let you know how you can have your site promptly reconsidered
for inclusion by a member of our team. First, I must note that your site did and
indeed still contains hidden text, despite what you noticed in a Yahoo
search result. As is common for search engines, including ours, text
that is not visible to a user viewing the web page ("hidden text") will
typically still be seen and indexed by search engine spiders (including
the "Googlebot"). That text is likely to be shown on search result pages
in "snippets" (descriptions directly below be shown on search result
pages in "snippets" (descriptions directly below each listing on that
search results page). In order to observe this circumstance for
yourself, please do the following: 1) Load the page http://www.american-buddha.com/what_is_buddhism.htm
in a browser such as Firefox or Internet Explorer. 2) View the source, or HTML text. In
Firefox, you can do this by right-clicking on the page and choosing
"View page source." In Internet Explorer, the corresponding menu item is
"View source." 3) Note the numerous paragraphs of
descriptive text within this source file, including this small excerpt:
"The Buddha's disciples apparently never begged any pencil and paper
from anyone." 4) Referring back to the actual page as
it appears in your browser, note that these words *are not* actually
visible on the page. This, therefore, confirms that you have an
extensive amount of hidden text on this page, as previously identified
by others on our team. Charles, our Webmaster Guidelines are
designed, in part, to prevent the undesired situation in which users
discover information of interest in our search results, click through to
the site, and are then frustrated by not finding the content they were
promised. Please note that we would be happy to
reconsider displaying your site in our search results once you have
taken the following steps: 1) Ensure that all paragraphs of text
within the HTML source are clearly visible to the user OR remove those
paragraphs entirely OR move them to (and make them visible on) another
page of your site. 2) If you have not already done so, sign
up for a free Webmaster Tools account via Webmaster Central (www.google.com/webmasters)
and follow the instructions to verify your site. 3) Click on the "Submit a reconsideration
request" link on the righthand side of the page. Once you have done this, a member of our
team will verify that you have indeed removed the hidden text and will
at that time reconsider your site for crawling, indexing, and displaying
in our search results. If you would like more specific
instructions on the usage of our Webmaster Tools, you may wish to read
the extensive documentation in our Help Center, also linked from
www.google.com/webmasters Regards, |