Ask PG: Why is my domain blocked? | Hacker News Reader

Ask PG: Why is my domain blocked?

32 pointsnoahkagan13 comments

We launched the http://appsumo.com optimization bundle which organically made front page of Hacker news. Then the deal article went dead;(

Bummer but as is life.

Then we just spent a few hours writing up this post on how we've doubled our conversion rate in two days: http://www.appsumo.com/blog/how-we-doubled-our-conversion-rate-in-two-days/

My friend Gabe Weinberg of DDG fame submitted it and it got auto-dead: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1636833

That's weird, maybe it's a fluke, resubmit: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1636832

Auto-dead again. Noah is tearing:(

I am not sure if it was cause our original front-page story was "commercial" even though we are a startup. There are a ton of startups that are "commercial" that don't get banned or dead, see Awesomeness Reminders: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1618019

Any one have any ideas?

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There have been a lot of re-submissions of appsumo.com, with all kinds of tricks to get it to pass the dupe filter.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1457353

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1535925

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1529957

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1535928

Maybe that's what triggered a ban?

I have no idea about other submissions besides the one Gabe told me he did.

Here is an old thread about the 'auto dead' domains and some of the reasons why they got killed:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=498910

It also has a list, but presumably that's long out of date.

Prediction: this thread goes dead to keep the recursion balance in the universe in check.

I wonder if your affiliate program is the source of the problem. Perhaps affiliates are submitting articles with their affiliate link and the mods got tired of deleting them?

BTW congrats on putting together a good bundle of conversion rate tools. I'll be picking up a copy myself.

Ask the receiver of rhetorical questions: does pg have an e-mail address?

I emailed pg already...

So then why not wait for an answer?

Asking like this is a way to get more appsumo exposure without incurring the ban on their links.

1- Didn't realize this would make homepage. 2- Thought it should be public that startups / articles are getting banned for unknown reasons...

http://appsumo.com will not be linkified then?

I'm not sure why you're getting flagged, but I really like your site, I'll be buying this bundle this weekend :)

I've suggested that the autokill program post a comment explaining the reason for the kill. Maybe PG thinks that gives away too much info to spammers and abusers, but I've seen a lot of frustration and confusion here that seems to come from the autokiller. Some insight would relieve that. The vast majority of us are well-meaning users.

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