Thursday, May 26, 2022

Site & blog de-indexed, expected retaliation from Epic Games

I became aware today that both my personal site & this blog had been de-indexed from some of the most known search engines, this includes Bing, Yahoo & DuckDuckGo.  In response to this, I've taken the time to post a new news entry on my personal site (on the home page) as well as will be blocking traffic from those search engines as traffic from those sites are noticed (while not expected there will be any traffic from those sites given they've done a full wipe of both this blog & my site from their databases, I suspect traffic from other sites where their pages have been cached is still possible).

While it's expected Epic Games is most likely the company that is responsible for this action (given they were the last company to have a boycott published against them after their changes with V-Bucks in Fortnite, locking them to the BR mode), there are other companies that are just as likely to be responsible for it based on their history of bad publicity cover-up (Bandai/Namco, Patreon, Pizza Hut, etc.).  In either case, because this happened only shortly after starting the Epic Games boycott, any expectations that I would have dropped the boycott against games that are developed using the Unreal Engine in a few years is now locked as that won't be happening, especially while this manipulation of legal methods & report functions to successfully allow cover-up of anti-consumer business practices continues to restrict search engine access to why those boycotts & reviews were published in the first place.

There are other search engines that still have my site listed in their databases (not so much the blog, but there are still results for the site, even if they are outdated or extremely lacking compared to what has been submitted to search engines for indexing).  For the time I will not be making any public recommendations as any public listing is expected to be the next attack from these companies to further succeed in their attacks to cover up the truth.

Ultimately this attack to fully wipe results for my personal site (this was already expected with the blog) puts a full lock on any boycotts that are currently in effect & any minor points that could have dropped off on their own over time won't be removed until either the boycott ends (meaning the company made the effort to correct the issue on their own) or I start seeing results for my personal site in search engines again (which is unlikely given they've already succeeded in their cover-up tactics).

In addition to their actions, I will be creating some auto-responses in my bot that will provide links to those boycotts when I happen to start on Twitch, meaning they will still get out one way or another.  I'll also be setting a timer that will occasionally give a link to my personal site, with details of search engines that have allowed this abuse to allow companies to succeeded in hiding truths about their companies (any attacks on the channel will result in further publications being made regarding further cover-up attacks to hide negative publicity about their companies, not that it's going to matter much when the most popular search engines have already blocked the site from their databases, but there are still some out there that haven't buckled to the aggressive cover-up tactics of anti-consumer companies).

In addition to this, I will be making it a point to block & ban these game & company pages from being able to access my channels on Twitch & YouTube.  The new commands will be triggered when their company names or games are mentioned in chat, which will provide a link to the pages detailing this information that they succeeded in hiding from the public.


UPDATE:  Bing has been contacted regarding this matter to ask why this has happened, using the Feedback function on their search results (the only functional contact function I could find on the site, the contact form for webmasters never finished loading).  In this attempted contact, I sent them the following (having to cut the attempt short due to a character limitation):

My personal site appears to have been wiped from Bing, Yahoo & DuckDuckGo.  I've already made an update about this on my blog (which is also wiped from these search engines), the site itself, my Facebook, my Twitch channel & created various commands in my Twitch bot to auto-respond to various terms of what was hidden from the public as a result of this wipe (expected to be aggressive retaliation to negative reviews displaying the poor behavior of anti-consumer companies), giving links to the site in those auto-replies.

At this point I'm simply trying to find out "Why?"  This wipe is expected to be a common discussion when I start to Twitch, how long it continues will be dependent on how long it takes to get this issue sorted out, I will just have to tell viewers "I getting ignored on my inquiry for a reason" until I am given a reason for this gross injustice.

Of course I don't really expect to get any response that is going to give any useful information in it, despite getting an email auto-response to the attempt fairly quickly (unsurprisingly, without any useful information):

The mention of this page is what leads to here (further details about this listed in the 5/26/2022 news update on the site).  As I mentioned in the contact attempt, this will probably be a common disussion when I'm streaming to Twitch (that is when I have the health to do so & have decided on something to stream, many of the games I used to stream now being restricted based on the terms of the boycott until the issue in Fortnite is resolved, which it's clear from Epic Games' response is unlikely to happen) until this matter is sorted out, however my research on the matter tells me I won't ever get a response about it & the issue will never be resolved on Bing or any other search engine that pulls results from Bing.

In the mean time, I've decided to remove the block of traffic from Google (previously blocked due to negating over 96% of the site from their site crawling, but this is still better than nothing).  Either way, I am going to have to recommend against any search engine that isn't listing the site, the recommendation of a search engine (already decided) will likely be made at a later date (probably a few months from now, stated later than sooner to slow down a repeat of whoever manipulated the reporting function on Bing to get the site wiped from it in the first place).

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