31–40 of 513 posts
Unfortunate story. It wasn't clear to me that the .online TLD led to Google blacklisting the site. Why did you think that was connected?
The .com purist advice is sound but you're not getting four-letter domain names that way, and in some ccTLD zones you can still. I was price-gouged out of owning a single, rare .icu domain when renewal fee for it went from 20 usd to 220 usd overnight, just for this one domain... I'm pretty sure it's not Gandi, but the TLD opetator, because other .icu domains I've had were fine. I decided to eventually abandon them al…
Yeah, what the heck happened to Gandi? It used to be my go-to, but nowadays... yikes!
Last year, my registrar wanted €64,99 to extend an online domain which I had created for fun. No thanks.
A great reminder even if you aren't a Google customer, Google's love of banning people with no notice or recourse will still screw you over.
That’s not fair. Google has no hesitation in banning its own customers either. Combine this with private equity vultures (namecheap) and shitty registrar, you are always one AI token away from being banned.
One conclusion is: > Not adding the domain to Google Search Console immediately. I don't understand. What is Google Search Console, and should I add all my domains there right now?
Google's way of tying real identifies of people to domains, without making it explicit.
Basically, your domain will be weirdly treated by a bunch of entities, none the less Google themselves, if you don't add your domain there (or some other Google property).
Especially with less common TLDs, like .online, they really want to be able to tie it to some identity, so unless you add it there, eventually your domain ends up on some sort of blacklist, in the case of the author it seems they used the "Google Safe Browsing" blacklist to get the author to involve Google somehow.
One conclusion is: > Not adding the domain to Google Search Console immediately. I don't understand. What is Google Search Console, and should I add all my domains there right now?
One conclusion is: > Not adding the domain to Google Search Console immediately. I don't understand. What is Google Search Console, and should I add all my domains there right now?
And yes, you probably should, if only to pre-register your ownership thereof if google ever decides to nuke you from orbit
I'm not particularly familiar with SEO or the massive black box that is Google Search - is this really as critical as the author makes it seem? I have both .lol and .party domains, both through porkbun (and the TLDs seem to be administrated by Uniregistry and Famous Four Media, respectively), and both are able to be found on Google Search. It seems like this preemtive blacklisting would be the result of some heuristics on Google's end; is .online just one of the "cursed" TLDs like .tk?
Hot Take: the proactive action of the registrar here is probably more beneficial than the number of false positives captured. If the registrar is aware that Google is hot on blocking potentially harmful sites, it's right that they take action expeditiously. The bigger problem is the unbanning - for which there should be a better system, probably that should take the form of the registrar having a short grace period t…
If the registrar tracks this information, a possibly helpful course of action would be to notify or warn the domain owner that they are on the list.
In the modern adversarial web, I do not want a registrar that proactively disables my domain because of some third party report.
I don’t know that the advice is solid in terms of never buying an alternate TLD.