Monday, May 16, 2005

Banning Google

Dr. Karl-Friedrich Lenz, a German law professor living in Japan and author of a book on Go as well as a PageRank 7 blog, is banning Google from his site to protest against the Web Accelerator... which he calls the “ultimate spyware”. Not only that, he’s also banning those searchers who arrive from Google (if you search for his blog on Google, and find what’s still left there, you will see a “banned” message when you click on it). In his new blog category “Google-free zone”, he’s detailing all the other ways necessary to kick the Googlebot off of your server, permanently.

So why is Dr. Lenz doing all this “anti search engine optimization"? Here’s his reasoning (emphasis mine):

“Two months ago, I had Google as the homepage of my web browser. It would have been fair to describe me as a fan of their service.

Now I have decided to shut them out completely from my website, which I declare a “Google-free zone”. (...)

There is a heated battle going on about exactly this question right now in Europe. Enemies of freedom are gaining influence and want to turn the Internet into one big surveillance instrument. Under these circumstances, it is absolutely unacceptable to try building the world’s largest Internet traffic data collection under the misleading excuse of speeding up web surfing. This calls for active resistance to Google, which deserves to be put completely out of business for this move.

To implement my new policy of completely shutting out Google from my pages, I will change the license for my online content, make necessary changes in “robots.txt” and set up the Apache rewrite engine in my “.htaccess” file so as to serve “www.yahoo.com” to everyone who follows a link from Google to one of my pages.

As a consequence, I will lose all readers who came in from Google until now. (...) In a conflict between losing readers and losing integrity, I have the luxury to choose integrity over reader numbers.”

[Via Search Engine Watch.]

Banning Google by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (5)

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