Google URL Removal Bug Blags Site Rankings

Direct from WebmasterWorld - a major flaw in Google's remove URL tool allowed unscrupulous webmasters to remove their competitor's URLs.

Basically it works like this. Let's say you use .asp web pages on your site - the competitor requests that www.example.com/index.html get removed - Googlebot comes to your site, but you don't have an index.html page - your main page is home.asp (or whatever) - google requests index.html - gets a 404 - so it says okay, www.example.com/index.html has been removed.

So what's the big deal? Well - Google removes not only /index.html but the home page of the site as well. The poster that outed the technique was able to remove the home pages of both Abobe.com (PR 10) and Microsoft.com (PR 9) in this manner.

So - if you have had a site in a competitive field that suddenly got its home page deindexed (and you don't use index.html as your home page) - well it might be worth looking in to.