On a normal day, users of the Google Custom Search Blog are greeted with tips and tricks for the Custom Search Engine software. This Tuesday it was something different. Users viewed a stock template and only one single post. The questions started: Who was this “Srikanth”? Was the site hacked? What did this oddly worded post mean?:

Google Custom Search, is the wonderful product from Google which many webmasters have been looking and dream for. It allows webmasters to create their own custom search engines to search only the sites he/she wants.

Also Google Custom Search is integrated with Ad-sense, which means make money while keeping users on your site for longer time with custom search engine.

I’ll cover up more on this powerful tool very soon in my next blog.

Good Luck for all the Custom Search customers(??).

Cheers,
Srikanth

Turns out it was simpler and much less nefarious. Google tagged their own blog as SPAM, and when the Google Search Blog administrators ignored the warning, it was then deleted. Once deleted, the blog address was snatched up by Srikanth and he posted the above message.

Phillip Lessen from Google Blogoscoped contacted Google to ask them what happened. Google got right back to him with a statement:

Whoops! We accidentally classified ourselves as spam, and our ever-perceptive Blogger settings caught us. The Custom Search Blog has since been restored, and we’re taking steps to ensure this doesn’t happen with other Google blogs in the future. Other Blogger users can make sure this doesn’t happen to them by reporting any problems to the Blogger support team via the Blogger Help Center at http://www.blogger.com/problem.g. We can then investigate.

Lesson learned. Don’t ignore SPAM warnings from Google, even if you are on the team!

Related:

Entry was posted on Friday, August 10th, 2007 at 9:22 am under Google, Spam.

Read more entries by Ema Kwiatkowski.
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