LiveLeak Not Indexed by Google! Conspiracy or Mistake?

LiveLeak.com is a sometimes-controversial video-based site which receives over a half-million visitors a day and was, until just recently, unindexed in Google - because they accidentally told Google not to index their site! Now, their initial distrust and confusion is understandable, given Google's relationship with YouTube. Clearly, LiveLeak suspected foul play and assumed that Google was intentionally keeping them unlisted to avoid competition. As it turns out, however, LiveLeak was responsible for denying Google the ability to search and index their site, through a modification in their robots.txt file. Perhaps the most interesting period in this mix-up came after the problem was fixed but while their front page still encouraged visitors to Google-search LiveLeak for themselves - a suggestion that remained on the site long after the problem was fixed and they were indeed indexed by Google. As a result, people clicking the link would find that LiveLeak was, in fact, indexed by Google.

In a rather tragic personal video a serious-sounding LiveLeak administrator describes how he had been trying to contact Google about this potential act of censorship. Meanwhile, this video has received comments ranging from ranging from "google has stepped out of bounds" to "google is with the government in censoring the internet and they must be stopped!!!" Meanwhile, of course, they were informed of the problem, which was on their end and not Google's, and have fixed it. Rather amazingly, however, the complaint video remains on their page, at least as of time this article was written. One has to assume this is only for public relations purposes, given that the actual problem is now long gone.

Even the Wikipedia article on Google censorship contains an (albeit now contested) sub-section pointing out this issue. Through this entire fiasco, the primary question remains: how can a site with a half a million visitors a day (and numerous web professionals looking into the problem) not figure things out sooner? This is hard to answer definitively, but now that they have removed the bot that blocks search engine crawls they are already getting a flood of links from Google. Perhaps, in the end, this was a great public relations ploy by LiveLeak from the start. After all, how better to start a public relations scandal to draw intrigue than by pointing a finger at the biggest name in the business and thus call attention to oneself? Certainly, LiveLeak is best known for releasing otherwise controversial videos that have been banned from YouTube - so perhaps they are trying to market themselves as the sub-cultural counterpart to this popular website. Either way, the debacle remains quite well documented in links that have yet to be updated - perhaps LiveLeak should leak a live video telling this story from start to finish!