Pakistan imposes YouTube ban - the wrong way!

There are ways of blocking content found on the Internet. Child safety software, filtering built into routers and firewall equipment. Even good ol' Internet Explorer has the capability to some end. While these are all viable ways of stopping users of a particular machine or Internet connection accessing content, it clearly doesn't work in favour of government bans.

Unfortunately, Pakistan went about it the wrong way on Sunday when they caused a 2 hour near global blackout on popular video-sharing website YouTube. The ban was ordered by Pakistan's government in response to the posting of a forthcoming Dutch movie trailer portraying Islam negatively; to enforce the ban it's alleged that Pakistan Telecom "hijacked" the Internet address of YouTube's web server. What effectively happens is you can route traffic to a completely different address, display a different website and disable access to the intended website.

The details of the "hijack" were leaked onto the Internet by PCCW, a Hong-Kong Internet provider, and as a result many other ISPs worldwide blocked access to YouTube.

YouTube's owner Google has since confirmed that Pakistan has lifted the country-wide ban and full service has been restored.

GoCompare gets knocked by Google penalty

Penalties are issued by Google for numerous reasons - link spamming, buying and selling, "black hat SEO" (or "spamdexing"), duplicate content, keyword spamming - they're all violations of Google's terms of service and can result in a pagerank penalty, listing drop, or even complete removal of your listings from the engine's database.

GoCompare found out recently that it also hurts to openly buy blog posts and reviews on other websites. Having held the #1 spot on Google for "car insurance", they dropped down below position 60 after Google issued a penalty on them for, seemingly, sponsored posts. To indicate the severity of the penalty, Hitwise seems to think GoCompare received an 87% drop in search term traffic after being banned for the term "car insurance". Obviously other companies will benefit from such a penalty; while an 87% drop in traffic from the term wasn't enough for the comparison site to comprehend, Hitwise also states in the same blog post that Compare.com, one of the comparison site competitors, found that traffic from the same search term increased by 77%.

What Google are doing is proving a point. It's in the best interests of website owners to think before they buy themselves into the top spots. In GoCompare's case, it might have been better for them to request a guest spot, or contributed articles to websites.