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How Google Nuked Sports Media Watch For A Crime It Did Not Commit

sportsmediawatch.com

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Re: How Google Nuked Sports Media Watch For A Crime It Did Not Commit

#21

Post by leephillips »

sharkweek wrote: post #5

Sounds algorithmic and not manual. A lot of the junk in the trunk of a once-spammmy domain is hard to chase off. It's always important to complete due diligence when buying a seemingly authoritative domain. From the horse's mouth: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-old-penalties-expired-dom... Personally I think Google should figure out a way to wipe clean a domain's history when it transfers owners, but... that crea…

The other side of this coin is that spammers can buy pagerank by purchasing a reputable domain and then using it for spam. That, it turns out, it what happened here (according to a Google engineer who explained after I published this): http://lee-phillips.org/hitchYellowPages/

Re: How Google Nuked Sports Media Watch For A Crime It Did Not Commit

#22

Post by jleader »

mkaziz wrote: post #3

Site isn't loading for me.

Me too, "403 Forbidden", which seems like a strange response. I could understand the site deciding to take it down, and showing a "404 Not Found", or getting overloaded and showing something like a "500 Internal Error", but this implies that they want it seen by some people and not others.

(Edited to add: it looks like the whole site is 403'ing, which suggests it's probably just a configuration error)

Re: How Google Nuked Sports Media Watch For A Crime It Did Not Commit

#23

Post by puranjay »

trevin wrote: post #14

This is what happens when Google actively penalizes sites for something that is totally out of their control (links pointing to their site). Granted, a large chunk of spammers know exactly what they are doing when they blast 1000s of links into a site, but what about the average webmaster? Or the small business owner who knows nothing about SEO and relies on a cheap "SEO firm"? Or somebody who isn't an SEO expert buy…

Negative SEO is a very real thing. You can buy links off black hat forums that are specifically advertised to help knock off your competition.

It's the same with other social media as well. Want to get one of your competitor's fledgling Facebook pages banned? A service will spam out the page link in FB comments for a few dollars. Then when the FB mods come calling, the onus of proving innocence becomes your responsibility.

The ease with which you can spam and hack your competitors online is becoming a little frightening.

Re: How Google Nuked Sports Media Watch For A Crime It Did Not Commit

#24

Post by puranjay »

bronson wrote: post #19
mkaziz wrote: post #3

Site isn't loading for me.

Me neither. Luckily it's in tha cloud: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:MnfiX2B...

It's a little ironic that the only way I can read a rant against Google through a caching service provided by Google

Re: How Google Nuked Sports Media Watch For A Crime It Did Not Commit

#25

Post by sharkweek »

leephillips wrote: post #21
sharkweek wrote: post #5

Sounds algorithmic and not manual. A lot of the junk in the trunk of a once-spammmy domain is hard to chase off. It's always important to complete due diligence when buying a seemingly authoritative domain. From the horse's mouth: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-old-penalties-expired-dom... Personally I think Google should figure out a way to wipe clean a domain's history when it transfers owners, but... that crea…

The other side of this coin is that spammers can buy pagerank by purchasing a reputable domain and then using it for spam. That, it turns out, it what happened here (according to a Google engineer who explained after I published this): http://lee-phillips.org/hitchYellowPages/

Yep - not uncommon for spammers to create powerful link networks by buying up a bunch of quality domains, and then spamming links at what they want to rank for.

It normally takes Google a few weeks/months to catch this stuff, so for super competitive terms, it's easy to make it worthwhile by ranking for something like "fast payday loans." Then when the domain gets penalized, rinse/repeating.

Someone teased Matt Cutts with this a while back:

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-payday-loan-cutts-16940.h...

Re: How Google Nuked Sports Media Watch For A Crime It Did Not Commit

#26

Post by TrainedMonkey »

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /2014/02/how-google-nuked-sports-media-watch-for-a-crime-it-did-not-commit/ on this server.

Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

Re: How Google Nuked Sports Media Watch For A Crime It Did Not Commit

#27

Post by mehulkar »

TrainedMonkey wrote: post #26

Forbidden You don't have permission to access /2014/02/how-google-nuked-sports-media-watch-for-a-crime-it-did-not-commit/ on this server. Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

Re: How Google Nuked Sports Media Watch For A Crime It Did Not Commit

#28

Post by datathis »

leephillips wrote: post #21
sharkweek wrote: post #5

Sounds algorithmic and not manual. A lot of the junk in the trunk of a once-spammmy domain is hard to chase off. It's always important to complete due diligence when buying a seemingly authoritative domain. From the horse's mouth: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-old-penalties-expired-dom... Personally I think Google should figure out a way to wipe clean a domain's history when it transfers owners, but... that crea…

The other side of this coin is that spammers can buy pagerank by purchasing a reputable domain and then using it for spam. That, it turns out, it what happened here (according to a Google engineer who explained after I published this): http://lee-phillips.org/hitchYellowPages/

Good post but I wish it had a date on it -- hard to know if recent or 5 years ago. Am I just not seeing the date?

Re: How Google Nuked Sports Media Watch For A Crime It Did Not Commit

#29

Post by IMJacobKing »

Woa woa woa, let's pump the brakes, you are misdirecting this. Of all the innocent victims Google takes on a daily basis, both algorithmically and manually, you are not one of them.

YOU made a mistake by not thoroughly researching the new domain before buying and moving your site. It's essential to check the history on a domain before purchasing and dumping all our eggs into a new basket, which for you was an unknown basket full of the previous owner's spam.

Archive.org, ahrefs.com, domaintools.com The only person to blame is you my friend, purchasing that domain and 301ing your old site sealed your own fate. So you're really just wasting everyone's time with a bunch of wining and pulling the big bad evil Google muwhahaha card.

For once, I'm on Google's side here. Party's over everyone, move along.

Re: How Google Nuked Sports Media Watch For A Crime It Did Not Commit

#30

Post by tzs »

I had a similar thing happen on my personal site, also due to phpBB2. The bad guys used an exploit in phpBB2 to upload a bunch of images of ads for cheap drugs and male enhancement products, and then they spammed links to those images to websites and in email.

I have no idea if Google noticed or cared, because I had nothing on my site that I expected people to find via search. I did have one page, some analysis I wrote on how to beat a particular puzzle, that was #1 on searches for how to beat that puzzle on both Google and Bing, and it stayed #1 [1].

[1] It's pretty funny. The page is just a simple page of mostly text, with some tables. No attempt has been made to optimize for search. There are very few incoming links, and one outgoing link (to a domain that once had an online version of the puzzle in question, but whose registration lapsed and is now owned by a noodle soup chain). I posted maybe one or two links to the page in comments I made on discussions of that puzzle a dozen years ago, and have done no other promotion of it. Yet for over a decade, it has been #1 on Google and Bing for searches on how to beat that puzzle. I have no idea why. (I have not named the puzzle or linked to the page here because I do not want to do anything that might disturb the situation. I'm curious to see how long it stays #1 without any promotion).

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