EMAIL FROM CHARLES CARREON TO HILARY WARE, GOOGLE, INC. DATED AUGUST 14, 2007

AMERICAN BUDDHA STRIKES ITS OWN BLOW FOR INTERNET FREE SPEECH IN KATHLEEN PARKER DUST-UP (AMERICAN BUDDHA VS. CITY OF ASHLAND, OREGON)

Google Watch, by google-watch.org

From: chas@charlescarreon.com
Date: 14 Aug 2007
To: "Hilary Ware" <hware@google.com>
Subject: Re: American Buddha

Dear Hilary:

Thanks for confirming that www.american-buddha.com http://www.american-buddha.com http://www.american-buddha.com http://www.american-buddha.com is not in the Google search index.

Following up on the information in your email, I asked the Site Administrator whether American Buddha has ever used "hidden text" to present a different face to search engines than to the human Internet user. The Site Administrator said that it has never been done.

My own investigation caused me to search for the first phrase of "hidden" text -- "Does this seems like no help at all?" This search produced one result:

http://www.american-buddha.com/what_is_buddhism.htm
http://www.american-buddha.com/what_is_buddhism.htm
http://www.american-buddha.com/what_is_buddhism.htm
http://www.american-buddha.com/what_is_buddhism.htm . On that page, the "hidden" text appears, plainly visible to the human eye, as the last three paragraphs of an article called "What Is Buddhism?" In summary, at the only place where I could find it, the text is not hidden. (See attached screen-capture of search results.)

Since you mentioned the Quality Guidelines, I reviewed them (see attached screen-capture), but cannot see where www.american-buddha.com http://www.american-buddha.com http://www.american-buddha.com http://www.american-buddha.com is out of compliance. My client has not used any of the methods cited in the guidelines to "game" the search engine:

Text (such as excessive keywords) can be hidden in several ways, including:

* Using white text on a white background
* Including text behind an image
* Using CSS to hide text
* Setting the font size to 0

Hidden links are links that are intended to be crawled by Googlebot, but are unreadable to humans because:

* The link consists of hidden text (for example, the text color and background color are identical).
* CSS has been used to make tiny hyperlinks, as little as one pixel high.
* The link is hidden in a small character - for example, a hyphen in the middle of a paragraph.

Even if the "does this seem ..." text were hidden somewhere on www.american-buddha.com http://onwww.american-buddha.com http://www.american-buddha.com http://www.american-buddha.com, it's hard to imagine how three paragraphs of Buddhist metaphysics could be considered "deceptive in intent." In the absence of some ""text or links ... solely for search engines rather than visitors," of which the site publisher is unaware, I do not see how my client's site has run afoul of the Google Quality Guidelines. That said, the Google employee who sent you the email undoubtedly has the addresses of the URLs that he or she believed justified
pulling the site out of the index, even though his or her email refers only to "sub pages of american-buddha.com http://american-buddha.com http://american-buddha.com http://american-buddha.com ."

Accordingly, would you be so kind as to make that internal request and forward me the URLs where the troublesome text lies hidden in the depths of the www.american-buddha.com http://thewww.american-buddha.com http://www.american-buddha.com http://www.american-buddha.com website? As soon as their location is identified, the administrator will be put to work remedying the problem.

Thank you for your courteous cooperation, and for confirming what I have been trying to talk to Google about for months -- that the website is not in the index. Now that we agree there is a problem, we can work on eliminating it. I look forward to your courteous cooperation to get www.american-buddha.com  http://www.american-buddha.com http://www.american-buddha.com http://www.american-buddha.com back in the index as swiftly as possible.

Charles Carreon
Online Media Law, PLLC
6161 East Pima Street #1139
Tucson, AZ 85712
Arizona: 520-821-4835
Oregon: 541-840-2798
www.charlescarreon.com http://www.charlescarreon.com http://www.charlescarreon.com http://www.charlescarreon.com

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