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Thanks Matt. I was building a business off of these domains and realized that Google rankings were the biggest wildcard, and really didn't want any trouble. So

Thanks Matt. I was building a business off of these domains and realized that Google rankings were the biggest wildcard, and really didn't want any trouble. So I read the Webmaster guidelines closely and often and didn't think I was violating them. However, I realize some were closer to the line and I should have focused on being less cookie-cutter and more useful in the domains that were really better (more farther along). I had always intended on coming back and working more on each, but wanted to get placeholders up quickly because it takes a while to get backlinks and indexed. I guess I'm saying I had hoped I would have at least been contacted with a warning and what was found objectionable before just being totally blacklisted with no reason given. I would have also hoped that each site would have been addressed individually. If I had been contacted and you had said, hey, you need to remove these misspellings off of these sites, I would have done it immediately. Here are some comments on the above though. Again, from my perspective these weren't violating the guidelines because the pages were useful from the user's perspective and there were no hidden tricks going on. First off, there were actually many categories of sites, domains was just one of them. Others were sports stats, definitions, language, medical, and addresses. For each site I made, I was modelling it off of other sites that had gotten great Google rankings for years. I had hoped to eventually improve the UX on those sites and get similar rankings. For domains, I'm talking mainly about who.is and domaintools.com. Each domain had a static site index, and that's what you linked to above in the screen shot. The extensive ones weren't really meant to be browsed, but just so search engines could find the pages (pre my knowledge of sitemaps). It's no different than any of the other static sitemaps, e.g. http://who.is/whois_index/index.php http://who.is/whois_index/index.php, and most of them looked better than the screenshot. That one in particular came from the code for the streetsandzips site that was a big tag cloud. I was trying to find ways to make the static site better, and that was one of them. It looks better when the fonts are of different sizes :). I had intended for that site to make them different sizes based on the traffic numbers, so Google, Facebook, would be really big, etc. On the streetsandzips site the bigger cities are bigger. In fact, I believe I evolved the sites so that those (site index) pages had noindex,follow on them such that they wouldn't come up on search results. I also added a search engine (Google custom search) on each page as well. I don't remember if I got to the tag cloud sizes for this particular domain at the time of blacklisting. As for the misspellings, I did mess around with those, but not on all sites, and I believe at the time they were blacklisted that had been removed from most of the domains, if not all. Common misspelling and typos as you know is a tool that people provide to those who buy domains. I built it for that purpose, and wanted to see how many people were actually searching for this stuff, so added it to some of the domains. Turns out, a lot of people do. I didn't just tack it on to the footer or cloak it or whatever; I put it in with a purpose that people ask for, e.g. common misspellings and typos. Additionally from the users perspective, if they got to this page by typing in one of those misspellings, they were getting a big link to the official site at top and then more information about that site, e.g. siteadvisor rating, traffic, etc. So it was essentially functioning as one-click Did you mean x. I'm happy to answer more questions about it. But it is pretty clear that it was still shoot first and ask questions later. No one ever contacted me about anything. I wasn't trying to hide anything from Google. It was all in my personal adsense account. I can understand from a search engine perspective, banning sites. But given I already had a relationship with Google, I expected to be contacted. In fact, at one point I had a call with an Adsense guy from Google trying to help me better optimize my sites for Google! He looked at them and had no issues with them, so I thought I was fine. Also, IIRC I submitted at least one re-inclusion request after being banned, and never heard a response back from that either. Before submitting that request I did a top to bottom review and tried to remove anything even close to the line, including misspellings I believe.

alexblack 16y ago
From what I've seen Google doesn't contact people :) My guess is they also have a policy of not sharing reasons for getting blacklisted, to ensure they're not giving spammers an easy way to fix their website. They claim they respond to all "Site reconsideration" requests. I had to file one once, they did respond, but with a very non-informative and unhelpful response.
- epi0Bauqu 16y ago
  Yeah, in retrospect I should have taken it slower and not gotten as close to the line in the first place. It's totally my fault, and I'm not bitter. As you can tell from the OP, I've had a lot of failure, and I similarly learned from this one.
  - Matt_Cutts 16y ago
    The tricky part is that the math works out something along the lines of there being ~200,000,000 domains and there being ~20,000 Google employees. At a simplistic level that works out to 10,000 domains per Google employee. Which means that even if Google stopped doing everything else and everyone at Google spent all their time talking to webmasters, they'd each have to answer 10,000 peoples' questions about rankings, how to make their site, whether they have ranking issues, etc. That's oversimplifying somewhat because there's lots of parked domains, but not too much--you'd be surprised how many people want to talk about their parked domains and why they aren't ranked the way they want. My team is vastly smaller than the number of Google employees, of course. And our first order of business has to be worrying about what users see when they search; talking to webmasters is the secondary priority. The net effect is that we haven't found a way to talk 1:1 with every webmaster, and I'm not sure whether that's possible. The story of webmaster communication for the last few years at Google has been trying to improve scalability of the info. The earliest Google webmaster communicator ("GoogleGuy") answered questions on a webmaster forum. In 2005 I started a blog, which has the advantage of permalinks for posts like http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-mistakes-autogenerated-doorway-domains/ http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-mistakes-autogenerated-doo... . We tried doing live webmaster chats, but that would only reach 400-500 webmasters at a time. The most scalable thing I've found so far is making videos. Here's a video that came out last month about the dangers of autogenerating pages for example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8bgpWtVHo4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8bgpWtVHo4 . We're at almost 300 videos now, and we're getting closer to 3M total views on our webmaster video channel. The hope is that this additional guidance helps people self-identify what can cause issues to avoid or to correct them without needing to talk to Google. The other big tool that has been helpful is http://google.com/webmasters/ http://google.com/webmasters/ . That provides tools to identify the common errors/mistakes that webmasters make (crawl errors, 404 pages, canonicalization, robots.txt issues, identifying hacked sites using the "Fetch as Googlebot" feature, etc.). That helps with many of the straightforward issues, but of course it doesn't solve the issue with "sheer number of webmasters who have ranking questions vs. number of Googlers." If anyone has suggestions on how to tackle communication with webmasters in a more scalable way, I'd appreciate feedback on how to do better on that.

alexblack 16y ago

From what I've seen Google doesn't contact people :) My guess is they also have a policy of not sharing reasons for getting blacklisted, to ensure they're not giving spammers an easy way to fix their website. They claim they respond to all "Site reconsideration" requests. I had to file one once, they did respond, but with a very non-informative and unhelpful response.

epi0Bauqu 16y ago
Yeah, in retrospect I should have taken it slower and not gotten as close to the line in the first place. It's totally my fault, and I'm not bitter. As you can tell from the OP, I've had a lot of failure, and I similarly learned from this one.
- Matt_Cutts 16y ago
  The tricky part is that the math works out something along the lines of there being ~200,000,000 domains and there being ~20,000 Google employees. At a simplistic level that works out to 10,000 domains per Google employee. Which means that even if Google stopped doing everything else and everyone at Google spent all their time talking to webmasters, they'd each have to answer 10,000 peoples' questions about rankings, how to make their site, whether they have ranking issues, etc. That's oversimplifying somewhat because there's lots of parked domains, but not too much--you'd be surprised how many people want to talk about their parked domains and why they aren't ranked the way they want. My team is vastly smaller than the number of Google employees, of course. And our first order of business has to be worrying about what users see when they search; talking to webmasters is the secondary priority. The net effect is that we haven't found a way to talk 1:1 with every webmaster, and I'm not sure whether that's possible. The story of webmaster communication for the last few years at Google has been trying to improve scalability of the info. The earliest Google webmaster communicator ("GoogleGuy") answered questions on a webmaster forum. In 2005 I started a blog, which has the advantage of permalinks for posts like http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-mistakes-autogenerated-doorway-domains/ http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-mistakes-autogenerated-doo... . We tried doing live webmaster chats, but that would only reach 400-500 webmasters at a time. The most scalable thing I've found so far is making videos. Here's a video that came out last month about the dangers of autogenerating pages for example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8bgpWtVHo4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8bgpWtVHo4 . We're at almost 300 videos now, and we're getting closer to 3M total views on our webmaster video channel. The hope is that this additional guidance helps people self-identify what can cause issues to avoid or to correct them without needing to talk to Google. The other big tool that has been helpful is http://google.com/webmasters/ http://google.com/webmasters/ . That provides tools to identify the common errors/mistakes that webmasters make (crawl errors, 404 pages, canonicalization, robots.txt issues, identifying hacked sites using the "Fetch as Googlebot" feature, etc.). That helps with many of the straightforward issues, but of course it doesn't solve the issue with "sheer number of webmasters who have ranking questions vs. number of Googlers." If anyone has suggestions on how to tackle communication with webmasters in a more scalable way, I'd appreciate feedback on how to do better on that.