It's a website filled with autogenerated content and links, how are you surprised that you got sandboxed?
How My Popular Site was Banned by Google
21–30 of 132 posts
Re: How My Popular Site was Banned by Google
#22You have an autogenerated web site that consists of practically nothing other than affiliate links to Amazon. You can make an infinite number of autogenerated pages on your site, e.g. http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=hacker+news http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=31.69 http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=teen+sex and each autogenerated page consists of literally hundreds of affiliate links stuffed with k…
Hi Matt, Thanks for responding. The point of the site is to find items of a particular price that qualify for free shipping on Amazon.com. If you want I will give you access to my google analytics to show you that this is a site people want and use. I guess I should not let people link to the search results page? http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=hacker+news and http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=anything+th…
My advice would be to use robots.txt to block out the autogenerated pages; when users search for e.g. a long-tail phrase and then land on a page that's nothing but affiliate links with a lot of keywords, they tend to complain to us.
Users would be happier if they landed on the root page of your site or the root page of http://www.superfillers.com/ or http://www.filleritemfinder.com/ than if they landed on a deep page full of links and unrelated products.
Re: How My Popular Site was Banned by Google
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi Matt, Thanks for responding. The point of the site is to find items of a particular price that qualify for free shipping on Amazon.com. If you want I will give you access to my google analytics to show you that this is a site people want and use. I guess I should not let people link to the search results page? http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=hacker+news and http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=anything+th…
Amazon already provides this service itself: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?field-keywords=filler...
A filler item is something with a specific (low) price used to make an order near the free shipping minimum reach that minimum.
A search for the words "filler item" is not at all related and not at all helpful.
Re: How My Popular Site was Banned by Google
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi Matt, Thanks for responding. The point of the site is to find items of a particular price that qualify for free shipping on Amazon.com. If you want I will give you access to my google analytics to show you that this is a site people want and use. I guess I should not let people link to the search results page? http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=hacker+news and http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=anything+th…
I think he can probably already see your analytics ;)
Nope, I can't. I can see how often the site shows up in e.g. our search results, but Analytics is a separate property and they don't send data to the search team either.
Re: How My Popular Site was Banned by Google
#25Yea that sucks, it's happened to me MANY times. The fact of the matter is, it's Googles world and we're just living in it...
Re: How My Popular Site was Banned by Google
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amazon already provides this service itself: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?field-keywords=filler...
A filler item is something with a specific (low) price used to make an order near the free shipping minimum reach that minimum. A search for the words "filler item" is not at all related and not at all helpful.
Sorry, try this instead: http://www.amazon.com/Shipping-Filler-items-under-shipping/l...
Re: How My Popular Site was Banned by Google
#27You have an autogenerated web site that consists of practically nothing other than affiliate links to Amazon. You can make an infinite number of autogenerated pages on your site, e.g. http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=hacker+news http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=31.69 http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=teen+sex and each autogenerated page consists of literally hundreds of affiliate links stuffed with k…
Hi Matt, Thanks for responding. The point of the site is to find items of a particular price that qualify for free shipping on Amazon.com. If you want I will give you access to my google analytics to show you that this is a site people want and use. I guess I should not let people link to the search results page? http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=hacker+news and http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=anything+th…
If I'm not mistaken, this type of SEO white-noise is exactly what Google work yo stop. It's just search engine spam for profit; No hands on work, just a script that targets search engine results and creates 'dumb content' to farm visits.
Re: How My Popular Site was Banned by Google
#28You have an autogenerated web site that consists of practically nothing other than affiliate links to Amazon. You can make an infinite number of autogenerated pages on your site, e.g. http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=hacker+news http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=31.69 http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=teen+sex and each autogenerated page consists of literally hundreds of affiliate links stuffed with k…
Still, when used as intended (with the query a dollar amount, like your 31.69 example), isn't his site useful? (I've not noticed a similarly straightforward tool for this same purpose at Amazon.com itself.)
The non-dollar-amount queries seem like a bug -- triggering a default of listing up from 0.00, unrelated to the query. If this were an intentional manipulative tactic, wouldn't the outlinks be related to the query?
Still, tons of sites have infinite paths when fed unexpected queries. At least in a cursory look over the filleritem site, there's no obvious self-linking to abusive keyword-based queries -- like your example .
If he just fixes it so that non-numeric queries get an error page, doesn't his homepage still deserve to be found by people searching for 'filleritem'?
It's not obviously worse than the current top hit for that (and similar) queries, which behaves almost exactly the same, but might not trigger your same heuristics with its AJAX-results loads. (In such cases I also have to wonder if the initial penalty may have been triggered by complaints, or maliciously-created links, from similar competitive sites that thought themselves immune from the same enforcement actions...)
Re: How My Popular Site was Banned by Google
#29You have an autogenerated web site that consists of practically nothing other than affiliate links to Amazon. You can make an infinite number of autogenerated pages on your site, e.g. http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=hacker+news http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=31.69 http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=teen+sex and each autogenerated page consists of literally hundreds of affiliate links stuffed with k…
I have no association with this person and just heard about this. But obviously those are search term result pages and not "autogenerated pages" in the usual sense. If Google is going to apply such a standard uniformly, they'd have to ban all sites that have search functions.
Autogenerated in the bad sense is link farms like fakesite.com/buy_drugwiththisname_now.html, with drugwiththisname replaced with 500,000 different possibilities, and all generating pages linked to each other, which also have incoming links from ten billion forum comments across the web where a bot has signed up en masse and posted spam.
Now, perhaps this guy is posting spam to his site in places which makes it valid to declare this a link farm and kill it.
Looking at the site now, being able to search amazon by exact price is a pretty neat function and is totally different from a link farm.
I think killing his site for having a search function is pretty unreasonable.
However, you are a private for-profit company, so you can do as you please obviously.
Re: How My Popular Site was Banned by Google
#30You have an autogenerated web site that consists of practically nothing other than affiliate links to Amazon. You can make an infinite number of autogenerated pages on your site, e.g. http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=hacker+news http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=31.69 http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=teen+sex and each autogenerated page consists of literally hundreds of affiliate links stuffed with k…
I actually used this site several times before I got an Amazon Prime account, and I think it has real value.
My sister always got a kick out of the fact there were random pirate stickers (or some other random cheap item) in her birthday gift. Free shipping!
Cleaning up spam sites is great, but it feels like Google is editorializing on this. A fine line.