Remove any Site From Google (even if you don't control it)

I think it's sad that he had to resort to publicly releasing this exploit because he couldn't find a way to contact Google about it.<p>In the past, when I've had problems, I couldn't contact them either. They've done a great job at making sure there's no human contacts available. You have to post something in a public forum and hope they'll contact you. (They won't.)

This bug could have been exploited for <i>millions</i> of dollars. Imagine giving a mafia boss control over the heartbeat of every rival. One blackhat SEO could have dominated any number of lucrative keywords.<p>If this bug has existed for a long time it's quite possible some guy is sailing around on a yacht that this bug paid for.<p>It's such a blindingly obvious bug that I really do wonder whether this might have been a backdoor/inside job by an employee. Google should <i>very</i> closely inspect the code change history.<p>Hopefully they also maintain a history of all page removal requests to see who might have been exploiting this.

Despite it being "fixed" not long after the blog post went live, I wonder how long/how many people knew about this bug. Seems like it would be a great trick for SEO (build page to certain PR/remove opponents ranking above you)

Does this _actually_ work though? You get the message "URL pending for removal" but does that mean it's really going to be removed? Perhaps this is just a default response.<p>Were any non-owned sites/urls actually removed?

I don't know how is possible that a so obvious bug passed their quality department, and I wonder if someone didnt discovered it before and was doing this to take out competitors indexes..

His first blog post...talk about setting high expectations.

Somewhat related: I wish GWT had a "pattern" removal.<p>With one of my sites, by the time I noticed that certain pages were missing the "noindex" tag Google happily indexed over 4000 pages. Considering the rate Google is crawling those pages it may take years to be removed from the index. Obviously, submitting each link one by one is rather tedious.<p>Hopefully the author is going to release that extension after Google fixes this bug. I may actually bother clicking 4K times just to see that site "fixed"...

&#60;i&#62;otherwise although it is a loophole I am pretty sure it is illegal.&#60;/i&#62;<p>It would &#60;i&#62;seem&#60;/i&#62; that this is illegal, but I've never heard of a law protecting one's right to be listed in a search engine.<p>Perhaps, if this process requires you to be the owner, it qualifies as fraud?

I am always amazed how experienced programmers can make such obvious errors when processing user input. Why would I ask for a URL of the WMT account in the query string?<p>I just hope that there is no "for the lulz" guy running a batch script to see how many million URLs he'll be able to remove before this gets fixed.

Imagine if LulzSec found this first

The link is broken. I'm not able to load the page.

that's really funny but very serious

I suspect some googlers are going to have a long night :-).

4 months ago one of my sites totally disappeared from Google. I wonder if this is because of this??? It's not a shady site, and there's no reason Google would remove ALL the pages.. if anything they'd penalize it.