Mulley v. Thinkhouse PR, strange happenings afoot?

Yesterday's Sunday Business Post had a belated report on the Thinkhouse PR move into Second Life. I previously wondered if Thinkhouse PR were engaging in blog-aided SEO to knock less than flattering commentary off the Google index but Jane McDaid says that's not the case -

"Our Second Life Agency is not a ploy to garner blog inches - its a move into a new communication opportunity for our brands. Our Second Life Agency is set up so that we can demonstrate to our clients / brands that virtual worlds present us with huge, un-tapped opportunities to interact with consumers. Its early days, so we'll see where it takes us. we are hosting our first PR event in Club thinkhouse next week."

However, while I was testing to see if my blog-aided SEO theory had any legs I did an ordinary Google search on "Thinkhouse PR" and to my amazement Damien Mulley's blog, which previously occupied 3rd place in the results listing, is now nowhere to be seen. Instead Tom Raftery's commentary on Damien's post has taken up the position. That's intriguing because Jane also commented on that issue -

"The DAta Protection AGency has reverted to THPR on the matter to which you refer. THey have confirmed that no further action will be taken against THinkhouse. They also apologied for having to follow the complaint up."

Hmm, what happened to Damien's post? How could it just drop out of the index like that? Will Tom's post suffer the same fate? Tune in next time....

UPDATE: Damien Mulley has spotted his apparent Google demotion and adds that  he's "awaiting to hear back from the Data Commissioner on whether I can publish their findings".

Comments

[Tom Raftery]

"They also apologied for having to follow the complaint up."

I'm sorry, what?

The DPA apologised for having to follow up on a complaint? The DPA have a statutory obligaion to follow up on all complaints. If indeed they did apologise for having to follow up on this one, as alleged by Thinkhouse PR, I'd love to hear the justification for that apology.

[Pat Phelan]

Publish and be damned
They did

[Adam Lasnik]

Hi there,

I already posted a comment on Damien's blog, but -- since it's currently being moderated and I figure it's best to quash the "I've been banned!" misconception promptly, I've reprinted the comment below. Hope you don't mind!

---

Hey, I like a good conspiracy as much as the next guy (big X-Files fan... well, of the early years at least), but I must respectfully note that there's no nefarious banning that's gone on here.

While it may be seen as unfortunate timing, some pages of mulley.net are currently not shown in our search results due purely to algorithmic factors... nothing manual or otherwise intentional about it.

It's quite possible that this may change as we continue to update our algorithms regularly.

Regards,
Adam, on behalf of the Search Quality Team at Google.

P.S. -- Ironically, with the online attention you've received about this issue, your pages may automatically end getting crawled more frequently or deeply, resulting in more of your pages being shown in our search results... so I humbly recommend a bit of patience.

[Keith Gaughan]

Adam, I'm a bit puzzled as to what those algorithmic change might have been. Was this down to some bugs in the code for pruning stale data from BigTable clusters? Some kind of accidental data loss such as that is all I can think of for this happening.

[Richard Hearne]

Keith

I think it may have something to do with the comments on the page in question referring to rather common terms that you would associate with a filter flag.

I too was very surprised by the page going phantom from the index but it would make sense based on the comments. Google has definitely being updating something over the w'end so it could well just be coincidence.

[Keith Gaughan]

Possibly, but their distance from the content in question and the fact that they only occur a very small number of times makes that very unlikely. Google would have choked on a lot more content dotted around the web than that if it was the case.

[Richard Hearne]

Coud be a contextual filter - looking for blog comments in particular. It would mean that a lot of other offending pages would have to be affected also, but I think perhaps this is something new from Google given the speed and strength of their response to the issue.

[Rob]

I've never seen this happen before, and I regularly read blogs with far more naughty words and so on in the comments. I'm not at all convinced.

[Keith Gaughan]

Richard, a contextual filter wouldn't be _quite_ that severe. It would take things like page structure and proximity into account. For instance, it would try to ignore data in comments that smelled bad on a page while keeping the rest of the content. Google can't really afford to be that conservative when indexing because it would negatively affect their results.

[Adam Lasnik]

No, no failure or bug. I'd agree that not serving that particular page of Damien's at this time isn't optimal, but there was no issue of data loss, accidental pruning, etc. But, as I noted, I imagine that the page at issue should reappear soon.

[Richard Hearne]

Hmm..

Adam stated "there was no no issue of data loss, accidental pruning". Would have to wonder just what happened then? The de-indexing wasn't a "failure or bug", wasn't "data loss" or "accidental pruning", so what's left?