'News' Related Internet Anomalies Wednesday Affect Salem-News.com

It just seemed odd and suspicious that the particular word "news" would be so strongly affected. This should give the more paranoid thinkers reading this something to talk about.

(SALEM, Ore.) - While monitoring the volume of Web traffic that Salem-News.com draws nearly every day, I have become a sort of addict, always eagerly anticipating the figures that a new hour brings.

These statistics are a direct reflection of how good we are on any particular day, and how many people our stories attract from search engines like Google, Yahoo and now Bing.

People who regularly visit Salem-News.com by typing in the URL or selecting it from bookmarked pages, were unable to access the site today.

Yahoo and Bing were working just fine also, but something very strange occurred on Google today that adversely affected our numbers for the day.

Our Web Designer Matt Lintz, along with our local Web point man David Duncan, were unable to point to the exact source of the problem. Each time we tried to select a Salem-News.com story from Google, an offline page flashed the message, "Page cannot be found".

Then our frequent contributing writer and good friend Daniel Johnson wrote, letting us know that the same thing was happening in Calgary. Then our reporter and friend Chuck Palazzo wrote from Da Nang, Vietnam, to say that the site was off the air there.

After a few hours, the functionality began to return, and soon we were able to access Salem-News.com stories again on Google, at least here in Salem.

Matt Lintz noticed that for hours, any sites with the word "news" in their URL would not come up on Google.

It just seemed odd and suspicious that the particular word "news" would be so strongly affected. This should give the more paranoid thinkers something to talk about.

As all of this took place today, new stories that we added to our lineup continued to make the cut on Google News, but then for hours they would not work.

Anyone reading this who would like to contribute their thoughts in our comment section or email should not be shy. We have seen strange things before that are similar, but fortunately this problem seems to be behind us. If you lost the ability to access Salem-News.com and later regained it, please let us know so we can keep track.

Tim King is a former U.S. Marine with twenty years of experience on the west coast as a television news producer, photojournalist, reporter and assignment editor. In addition to his role as a war correspondent, this Los Angeles native serves as Salem-News.com's Executive News Editor.
Tim spent the winter of 2006/07 covering the war in Afghanistan, and he was in Iraq over the summer of 2008, reporting from the war while embedded with both the U.S. Army and the Marines. Tim holds numerous awards for reporting, photography, writing and editing, including the Oregon AP Award for Spot News Photographer of the Year (2004), the first place Electronic Media Award in Spot News, Las Vegas, (1998), Oregon AP Cooperation Award (1991); and several other awards including the 2005 Red Cross Good Neighborhood Award for reporting. Serving the community in very real terms, Salem-News.com is the nation's only truly independent high traffic news Website, affiliated with Google News and several other major search engines and news aggregators.
You can send Tim an email at this address: newsroom@salem-news.com

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Osotan; September 17, 2009 7:25 pm (Pacific time)

had the same problem yesterday,17 sept.,tried from my "favorites" menu several times and got onto Google where you are the first on the page and same thing,the"page could not be located" came up. Obviously is working now. Good luck in future.

Rusty S. September 17, 2009 1:11 pm (Pacific time)

Talk about paranoid? Why are you guys hiding your domain registration through a proxy service? Anyway, you don't appear to be using your ISP's DNS servers and are using a 3rd party called Zoneedit. They posted this and is the source of your temporary problems: Network Status Last Update Time: 9/17/09 09:27 am PST Status: Due to malicious activity directed at ns15.zoneedit.com, the server is not providing DNS. Our network engineers are working to mitigate the problem as soon as possible. If reliable DNS service is critical for your site, we recommend logging into your account, clicking on "Nameservers" and purchasing a "tertiary" nameserver. 3 nameservers are exponentially more reliable than 2 nameservers. NS15 is your primary DNS server. Simple. :-)

Rusty S. September 17, 2009 12:35 pm (Pacific time)

It wouldn't be related at all to Google or any of those search engines. I could not get to salem-news.com the other day so I did the very basic troubleshooting step of doing an 'nslookup salem-news.com' and your DNS server (whomever you host with) was not responding with an answer. Without that you can't convert the name to your IP address. Likely your hosting provider was having some DNS server issues at the time.

Anonymous September 17, 2009 10:11 am (Pacific time)

I had no problem, but I use a piggy back code link (constantly rotates IP configurations, when I turn it on).

Mike H. September 16, 2009 11:16 pm (Pacific time)

I check in on SN pretty much daily, I assume you see my IP come up and can verify haha Anyhow ya, I thought it was weird, I usually go in the same routine, check my networking sites like MS and FB then check hotmail then I check up on SN. So I know my connection was fine then I clicked my bookmark to SN and it came as as a load error. I assumed my network times out or something stupid so I did it again and got the same message. Got frustrated, did it again and it popped right up. All good now I see! Keep up the good work.

Tim King: Thanks Mike, we appreciate your presence and your feedback, it helps!

Daniel Johnson September 16, 2009 10:26 pm (Pacific time)

I'm not paranoid. They really are against us.

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