Google briefly drops .info domains from their index

27 May, 2008 | Google

Over the last few days, we have noticed reports coming in from webmasters and Search Engine Marketer's suggesting that Google dropped .info and blogspot results from its index.

The first reports started coming in around 10am on the 23rd of May, followed by dozens of concerned webmasters asking the question 'how Google can completely wipe off many (not all) .info TLDs and all Blogspot results?'.

Some five or so hours later, webmasters began to see the old results coming back into the Google index.

Here is one WebMasterWorld members reaction:

This has happened to my .info domain since last night and I am really upset at it.

All my 300 keywords have stopped working in Google but my site still appearing in Google with site:www.example.info and www.example.info searches.

Yesterday I received 600 visitors from Google and today only 4.

My .info domain is one and half years old. Till, Today I regularly update it with unique content and don't promote it much as I am already receiving number of visitors.. I never did spamming or adopted prohibited ways to promote the site.

I do not own nor manage the SEO for many .info domain names, but a few of them i do have under my control have quite solid profiles. Regardless, on the 23rd of May all of these .info websites completely disappeared from Google's search results... only to return the next day.

The .info domain name is often atributed to spam and promotional sites, however most webmasters where attributing this to a fairly large scale Google bug.

Marcel Feenstra highlighted this issue on LockerGnome:

Filtering out all .info domains just because some of these domains are being abused is, of course, far too draconian a measure, and I don’t think it’s what Google intended. It would make much more sense if they filtered out, say, .info domains that had been registered less than a year ago and that didn’t have some minimum number of “trusted” backlinks.

So was the dropping of .info domain names a bug? Possibly, but Google would never accidentally filter out all .com domain names from their index. This must have been the result of an algorithmic tweak possibly aimed at .info domain names.

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