Wednesday, March 8, 2006

Sat1 Quicklinks Removed

A while ago while covering German search spam, I reported on Sat1 Quicklinks – search results being offered to search engines (that’s a common form of spam to make it look like you have content, even though the company responsible for the Quicklinks, SoQuero, argues that it’s just like “news pages which allow e.g. their archives to be crawled”). Now even though the homepage of German cable channel Sat1 still links to quicklinks.sat1.de, the page itself now redirects to 213.133.118.110, which reads:

“Sorry, this page is not existing here!

If you are a user you may have used an outdated link or bookmark.

If you are a search engine bot please remove the page you called from your index.
This page provides you with a 404 server header!”

(See how the creator actually talks to the search bot? I suppose that’s what happens when you optimize for search engines only, and not users.)

So have the Quicklinks been banned by Google? At this time, a site search for these quick links on Google returns 0 results. Last month, it returned over 50,000. However, the site might have been removed by Sat1/ SoQuero themselves in response to the accusations before Google removed it from their index due to a file-not-found header.

[Thanks Leonard Cohen.]

Update: It’s a day later, and the Quicklinks link has been removed from the Sat1 homepage (it’s actually commented out at this time, so you can still find it in the HTML source).

Sat1 Quicklinks Removed by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (0)

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