In the late nineties, I played drums in a local theatre production and
at one of the cast parties, a bunch of actors told us we HAD to see Waiting For Guffman.
You've seen this mockumentary right, from the Spinal Tap guys? Pretty
funny. A middle-of-nowhere town puts on a ridiculous play with the
hopes of being discovered by a famous Broadway producer, ala Guffman,
who they hope will fly to the middle-of-nowhere to see their winning
production. This is why they are Waiting For Guffman. I'll let you watch the movie to see if he ever shows up.
Meanwhile,
in real life, we are sitting here in Bloomington, Illinois (yes, pretty
much middle-of-nowhere) waiting for GOOGLE. Waiting for Google to
start showing search results again for 100 Year Picnic. To see for yourself, here's a Google search on '100 Year Picnic'.
For about the
past two months, Google has blocked our site, www.100yearpicnic.com,
from their search results. Why? I have no idea. We have never received
any notification or any reasons why, even after multiple attempts to
contact Google. We have filled out the necessary forms, and our job
now is to sit and wait. Pretty freaky. And lame.
Update: Sometime in early December, we appeared again in the Google search results. Despite our various attempts to contact Google in this 10 week period of time, we never received a single communication from Google nor any indication of any wrong-doing.
Apparently this is happening to plenty of other reputable web citizens. You know what, there are just so many examples, like this one here and here and here. Now the irony: How did I find all of these examples? Google.
Look, I'm no Google basher. Don't want to be. They do make life easier for all of us, at least most of the time. I believe they have the right intentions and they obviously have some of the brightest minds in the world. I know they have a pretty tough job trying to stop the bad
guys on the internet, the spam bloggers (sploggers) and others trying
to game the search engines or mislead the internet consumer. I can
only assume this is some automated error.
But come on, this is wrong. Google was founded on user-centered design principles, so shouldn't it be a priority for Google to:
- Be accountable for their decision and actions to shut down accounts, reduce PageRank to zero, and block sites from search results.
- Provide clear feedback and communication when a problem is identified and suspected.
- Provide a more expedient way to resolve problems.
- Get smarter in their effort to sort out the bad sites from the good sites.
So now what? I've done everything I can do. And I've waited almost 2 months with no results, no communications, and no answers. I hate asking for help, but do you know anyone that works for Google that can help us??? It seems like that is the only thing that works.
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