Wednesday afternoon, Digg disappeared from Google. Vanished. Gone. It was clear that Google had de-indexed Digg, but why? To what end?
Was it because Digg had just announced plans to build a Google Reader clone to satisfy angry users when Google kills the product on July 1st? Was Google just being a dick?
No, conspiracy theories were put to rest when Google released a statement, saying that it was all just a big screwup.
We’re sorry about the inconvenience this morning to people trying to search for Digg. In the process of removing a spammy link on Digg.com, we inadvertently applied the webspam action to the whole site. We’re correcting this, and the fix should be deployed shortly.
And fixed it they have. Digg is back up in Google:
It’s not like being de-indexed in Google was really a killer for Digg, considering the majority of their traffic is direct. But for Digg, you’d at least want digg.com to show up in a search. Thankfully, Google has fixed the screwup and everyone can carry on.