Forum Moderators: open
[edited by: NFFC at 12:20 pm (utc) on Sep. 21, 2002]
[edit reason] No URL's please [/edit]
Really? Then it seems like a lot of new -- potentially relevant to my search terms -- websites might be getting unfairly penalized for the sins of their domain's former owners....
If your penalty policies are really so arbitrary in relation to the actual websites being ranked thereby, it looks like it might be time for me to start looking for another primary personal information source online.
I can think of a lot of innocent first-time webmasters who might run afoul of a lingering expired domain penalty, even though their sites might be 100% relevant to a searcher's query, and 100% innocent of any intentional spamming techniques.
Sounds to me like Google might be becoming more interested in handing out arbitrary punitive ranking penalties than in returning truly relevant search results... not a good sign. I really hope my gut feeling about this is wrong.
If you can fill that sort of space on the right side with text then it changes the margin ;)
Google is it so hard to rethink your ban/penalty policy before you kill the net, your not just a company - you have a great power over the net and those who are listing in your engine - and which that comes responsibilty.
It would take me 5 minutes to think up a system that would make better sense than what you currently use...and im sure there are many guys (and gals) here that could chip in some suggestions you havent even imagined yet in googleplex...
Woz, you make an analogy between a house and a domain name. One difference between houses and domain names is that most people don't own dozens of houses. ;) Most people also check for liens and outstanding issues before they buy a house. An SEO should do the same thing before buying a domain. If you're a professional SEO, you'll want to pay the same attention to properties as a real estate appraiser would. It's easy to see if a domain used to be registered to someone else previously at several sites.
I don't think we'll be running out of domain names anytime soon, and the reality is that only a miniscule amount of domains have penalties. [For example mack, the domain in your profile doesn't have any ;)]. In fact, this is only the second time that I've seen this happen. Average mom and pop webmasters don't have to worry about this issue--the people who need to be aware of it are the people who buy lots and lots of domain names.
But it really doesn't take too much to go to archive.org or search on Google for the exact domain (including extension) to see if the site using that domain was up to all sorts of naughty stuff.
Even though I think it sucks Google sometimes sticks a pernament penalty on domains - at least their search results are cleaner than any other search engine. What would the Google index look like if this rule didn't apply?
Now, if I can just get Ultimate Search to sell me that domain I've been after for a year, I would be happy....
I just checked my collection of about 30 previously expired domain names using the web archive site and found that one of them was definitely owned by some dodgy characters. Of course, the domain name in question is a porno word and when I bought it I knew it was very much a case of buyer beware. The lesson I learn here is that I really should separate my dodgy domain names from my safe ones.
The thing is, three or four of my other domains don't appear in the archive at all, but this doesn't reassure me that they have a clean history... does anybody know of any other ways of checking the history of a web address?
You have just made my day ,week ,whatever :)
i dont believe that there are that few domains that hold penalties, and if there are - then your policy towards cleaning up the net is not doing nearly as good a job as you'd like to make out...
you say your the cleanest engine, striking a tough pose to those who dont play fair, and we know that you dont get rid of bans/penalties other than in rare cases - and now you say that hardly any hold them. this would imply your not doing anything about the thousands and thousands of sites that are cheating, and seemingly only getting those that accidently have a server down, or who have legitimate reasons for whats being classed as spam by you...
The way I read GG is that the penalty is not that arbitrary:
The decision flow appears to be as follows:
1) Does the domain have an existing penalty?
2) does the current owner hold title to more than 12 domains?
If both are true then the penalty is enforced (preserved), if either is false (untrue) then no penalty.
Some will fall through the cracks, too bad for them.
At the risk of being cast into the flaming pit of Google damnation for saying this, the above is baloney. Woz had an excellent point. To start, why GG do you assume that the average person buying a domain has lots of money and is going to be hiring SEOs? You do realize most domains in use aren't even commercial, right? How is the average webmaster going to know how to research the history of a domain? Does Google even warn about this, and tell people how to search the history of domains? NO. Typically, people will just see a domain name that looks appealing is unregistered, and buy it.
And, Google is engaging in outright hypocrisy. May I call attention to what is on Google's own site:
[google.com...]
"Do:
...
"Be very careful about allowing an individual consultant or company to 'optimize' your web site. Chances are they will engage in some of our "Don'ts" and end up hurting your site."
Google is outright spreading FUD about the very notion of hiring someone who is a SEO! And now you recommend that people hire an SEO to check out the history of domain names? And, Google doesn't make publicly available a list of banned domain names. Thus, for the average person it is a roll of the dice if they see an appealing domain name unregisterd, buy it, and start using it. If it wasn't penalized before, A-OK. If otherwise, the webmaster is SOL and hosed for all time at Google.
And, may I point out that people who play games trying to scam Google typically will buy a domain name, get while the getting is good by cheating, and then as soon as Google bans it discard it and move on with other domain names they have. To a search engine scammer, domain names are expendable. Thus, I'd expect that most of the domain names that Google bans eventually will be allowed to lapse, and not infrequently bought by people who just liked the name. Not realizing they were just buying into Google's dog house.
As mivox stated, Google seems more interested in handing out arbitary penalties. And if an innocent webmaster ends up not being able to get into Google, they are just "collateral damage". IMO Google needs to come up with a better system.
Do you honestly believe that as soon as a domain name lapses Google lifts the penalty, and then only reinstates the penalty if after investigating the new owner to see if they have at least a dozen domains that they do?
Consider a new company, 6 months down the line they take the URL that is a carbon copy of their company name.
What they didn't know is local SEO for rival company polluted those URL's with spam and have been tagged by G.
Who's to stop it....
No I don't, I believe that they perform a check periodically comparing the information they know about a domain and it's ownership, then apply the conditions. I think Google is going after "intention", what is your intention?
If you own a number of domains then the assumption is you should know better and know how to check for pr0 domain-incarnations, if you own few domains then the penalty gets removed at one of the periodic checks since it is unlikely your intention was to derive artificial benefit.
All i think should be is that Google should have a policy on site bans and penalties, thats all. But simply have a computer pop up a site that is being naughty, having a look and banning forever (unless they happen to be forum buddies with googleguy, which isnt likely in most cases). There should be a very strait forward policy towards these sites, it neednt take up many resources at all, and i truly believe it would make the net better...
what about sites that owners have hired an SEO specialist who does something wrong? The company is totally up the creek without a paddle, as they have little hope of ever getting an email replied by google...theres simply nothing they can do other than swap domains.
All suspected sites should have a bot that thoroughly checks a site for 'spam' if thats flagged then a googleguy takes a look, and removes the site from the index for a period of say 3 months (which is a long time in business terms) - and it should be either a severe penalty or a ban. With this comes a stern warning that the site must be rectified sharpish or else they wont get back in...but as well as this all sites that are affected by bans or penalties should be documented, and archived, so that you can see if your site, or any potential site you may buy is in trouble...
cheating websites is a big problem, as every website in the world wants more visitors - by creating a decent way of dealing with them you could clean up the net for good, as soon people would realise its not worth the constant traffic death...
We prefer not to handle spam reports manually, but every so often a manual response is needed for a report. That's what happened with car-buytips's domain before. When someone has to investigate a spammer and put a penalty in place by hand, it makes sense that that penalty would last a little longer.
rfgdxm1, you say that most domains in use aren't commercial. I differ on that point. :) And the average mom and pop doesn't need to worry about this issue; professional SEOs need to be aware of it. A professional SEO needs to consider the domains that they're buying because they buy so many.
I'm trying to help out by reminding the SEOs on this board of something that most of them already know, or should know: buying a domain means that a domain name will resolve to a desired IP address, and that's about it. :) It doesn't guarantee anything good or bad on Google.
Instead of bitching about it, why don't some of you try to come up with a way that google would still be able to *do what they need to do*. There is a reason why they do this. Help them refine their algorithm, because it isn't going away.
As this is only the second time GG has seen this happen, I suspect that some checks were put into place already. You know he's never going to tell you everything.
You have to think that anything that gets SEOs so riled up must be doing something right;-)
I'd be really interested in how the folks at Google determine if a domain is owned by a SEO or by a mom and pop shop....seem to be lots of lists flying around on that messy desks at the plex
That really isn't all that difficult, and since they only have to do it on domains that are in trouble, it is even easier.
How many domains do you own?
How are the names related?
Which registrar?
Which tricks are used on the different sites?
What domains in the past, owned by this individual have been penalized?
Do they churn through domain names?
They do not have to be 100% accurate. They are not compiling a list of every SEO owned site. Nor do they care about SEOs that run clean sites. They aren't making a list of SEOs, that's not worth the trouble.
I have no doubt that they do keep a list of certain names with a history, and if they do *anything* wrong they will be hit with a penalty much quicker.
I was sure that I had a genuine Pr0 it has now been clarified that I dont have any Google imposed penalty, surely there are a lot of peopel in the same situation as me, who just assume that because they get dropped they have been penalised. I now belive that we ned to build up some sort of knowledge base of other factors that can have the same effect as a penalty, but are controled by ourselfes (or our host) here are a few to get us started.
.Mistaken placement of a robots.txt that banns Googlebot.
.DNS changes at your hosting company.
.Server downtime at the time of a Google crawl.
.Down time on a site that you class as a major link to you.
.Sites that you class as strong links using JS.
.Googlebot simply not finding your site in any month.
[edited by: mack at 7:22 pm (utc) on Sep. 21, 2002]
It seems like common sense to me that if you purchase substantial numbers of domain names, you should be carefully assessing the value of those domain names. I'm just trying to remind SEOs that they probably want to consider that.
They go look at all the sites and see what they do. Find the worst offenders that they are not currently catching, try and find a way to catch *everyone* who does that without having too many false positives.
That's why there are such large groups of penalties handed out at once for similar behavior.
Then if they can't figure out how to write an algorithm to cover that case then they will do the ban manually.
That is why it can take months.
Thanks Lisa! It's nice to have the moderator of the domain names forum confirm the date that the domain expired last year. Kind of a bummer to lose .gov data, isn't it?
