Hide & Seek with Google

The July first banning of all co.cc domains by Google has many site owners feeling high and dry because their sites are not listed in Google's search engine results.

    If you are one of the victims, or one of their affiliates or visitors, take comfort in the knowledge that your site still exists, it is just a little more difficult to find.

    Visitors should bookmark their favorite sites and should refrain from clearing out their browser histories with CCleaner or Advanced System Care. As long as the history links remain, you can still get to your favorite sites by typing a few characters of the name. 

    Site owners and web masters should encourage the use of alternative search engines such as Bing.com, alltheweb.com & dogpile.com.   If your site was previously listed in Google SERPS, it will very likely remain on those other search engines.  http://freewebsubmission.com/ will  submit your site to a large number of search engines at once. Make good use of it. 

    There is more than one way to skin a rat. Shortly after creating Crusader's Armory, I created a blogspot blog with the same name and a side bar link to the main site.  Google searches don't list the main site anymore, but they still return links to the blog, where readers can find a link to the main site. 

    Google claims that sites on free domains tend to be spammy and distribute malware.  Earlier this year, my political enemies accused my site of spam & malware. Co.cc took the accusation seriously and cut off my DNS for a  week  until I proved to them that my site has legitimate, original content and the software it offers is both utilitarian and safe. I compiled it myself and it was scanned with one of the best anti-virus programs before being uploaded.

    Free domain names and free server hosting are not indicators of a site's content quality. You can not judge a web site by its domain name any more than you can judge a book by its cover.  When Geocities dropped its free hosting program, I ported my site to Free Bee. When Free Bee dropped its free hosting service, I switched to their paid service. The content of my site and its quality remain the same. 

    My blog posts generally contain links to my sources so that readers can verify their content and explore source texts in more depth.  That gives readers a good basis for judging the quality of my posts.  Other bloggers and web masters can and should do likewise.  http://www.crusadersarmory.co.cc/ specializes in links to useful resources for people who write about Islam.  

    One of my best resources, UrlGenerator.exe, is a Windows utility that turns Surah & Ayeh or book & hadith numbers into urls so that writers can link to the Qur'an &. hadith.   Early this morning I lit up a Facebook friend's life by telling him about it after he had spent a great deal of time hand compiling and posting a long list of hadith links. 

    Did Google as some suggest, deindex co.cc domains at the behest of a foreign power desirous of eliminating web sites run by churches in their country?  We will probably never know for sure. Did Google act without considering the possible economic consequences?  If they rescind the ban, will it be the result of a sudden decline in income from Google Ad Words?  We can only speculate; perhaps time will tell.