Creepy Crawly Feeling - 2

As a result of the item that someone was blocking my blog and main website, Netsparx, the Goa-based company maintaining www.undiplomatictimes.com unceremoniously dumped me as a client. In the process I discovered the actual ISP is Bagful.net in Haryana. Netsparx has not responded to repeated queries whether information to access my site was given to anyone else.

Google reported on 2 December that its crawlers received the 404 error (not found) response from the entire blog site as well as from the following specific items:

1. The Indian Press - 6: The Press as Business (posted July 2011)
2. The Indian Press- 7 a: The Foreign Hand (posted August 2011)
3. NYT Blog Asks Why no Indian Steve Jobs (posted October 2011)
4. What Are They Advertising? (posted October 2011)
5. Posts relating to keywords India and China.

The list indicates an attempt to restrict access to what I have to say about the Indian mass media, advertising, and their foreign connections. (By the way, The Indian Press - 7 b: Foreign Links, has been delayed by the need to further research the very extensive ties that bind our media to Britain.)

Meanwhile, according to a Google report on 2 December, the visibility of the blog on the worldwide web continued to be restricted by 343 robot.txt files. (Those files signal search engine "crawlers" not to report the contents of the site.)

Who is responsible for this?

It is difficult to say right now. Will post on any discoveries as I continue to ask around.

Meanwhile, would appreciate reposting by readers who do have access to the blog.

A Creepy Crawly Feeling

A few days ago I finally figured out how to get Google Webmaster Tools to divulge traffic statistics about this blog, and made a rather unexpected discovery: someone is trying to block access to it.

A report I downloaded on 25 November said – if I am reading it right – that there had been 363 recent cases of “restricted by robots.txt,” “Not Found” responses had been returned five times, and “Unreachable” once.

That cleared up the mystery of the small “Web page cannot be found” sign that always floats over some part of my blog even when the page is open and readable. (I had paid it no attention, thinking it was caused by the slow speed of my Photon link,)

After some research I discovered that the “robots.txt” file is meant for outdated pages that site-owners do not want search engines to find. It is the Web equivalent of a No Entry sign; the page thus marked does not show up on keyword search results.

Who would want to block a private blog that is admittedly opinionated but hardly a threat to anyone?

I discovered a number of anomalies also on the www.undiplomatictimes.com website, which has of late been difficult to update because of what I had thought were technical glitches.

As Google's Blogger is beyond the reach of direct queries from users of its free services, I sent off an email message to the company in Goa, Netsparx, that has arranged for the hosting of undiplomatictimes.com. That was yesterday. No response yet, but I have a creepy crawly feeling that it won't be good when it comes.

If readers of this blog have any advise about what to do about this problem I would be grateful for advise to: papamenon04@yahoo.com.