By accident, journalist Jack Poulson discovered Google had completely de-listed two of his articles from its search results. “We only found it by complete coincidence,” Poulson told 404 Media. “I happened to be Googling for one of the articles, and even when I typed in the exact title in quotes it wouldn’t show up in search results anymore.”
Poulson had stumbled on a vulnerability in Google’s search engine that allowed people to maliciously delete links off of Google, which is a reputation management company’s dream and which could easily be used to suppress information. The SEO trick had allowed someone to de-list specific web pages from the search engine using Google’s Refresh Outdated Content tool, a site that lets users submit pages to URLs to be recrawled and re-listed after an update. The vulnerability had to do with capitalizing different letters in the URL in this tool, which ultimately caused the delisting.