My history of (mostly failed) side projects and startups

For example, one of the big issues in blackhat spam this past year was illegally hacked sites. Our algorithms weren't doing the best job on hacked sites, so the manual team kept an eye out for hacked sites to remove them (and often to alert the website owners that they'd been hacked). The data generated by the manual team helped us build and deploy multiple new algorithms to detect hacked sites, leading to a 90% reduction in the number of hacked sites showing up in Google's search results in the past few months. That decrease in hacked spam in turn frees up the manual team to tackle the next bleeding-edge technique the spammers use.

I suspect every major search engine uses similar approaches: try to stop the majority of spam with algorithms, but be willing to take action in the mean time while engineers work to improve the algorithms.

However, I realize some were closer to the line and I should have focused on being less cookie-cutter and more useful in the domains that were really better (more farther along). I had always intended on coming back and working more on each, but wanted to get placeholders up quickly because it takes a while to get backlinks and indexed.

I guess I'm saying I had hoped I would have at least been contacted with a warning and what was found objectionable before just being totally blacklisted with no reason given. I would have also hoped that each site would have been addressed individually. If I had been contacted and you had said, hey, you need to remove these misspellings off of these sites, I would have done it immediately.

Here are some comments on the above though. Again, from my perspective these weren't violating the guidelines because the pages were useful from the user's perspective and there were no hidden tricks going on.

First off, there were actually many categories of sites, domains was just one of them. Others were sports stats, definitions, language, medical, and addresses. For each site I made, I was modelling it off of other sites that had gotten great Google rankings for years. I had hoped to eventually improve the UX on those sites and get similar rankings. For domains, I'm talking mainly about who.is and domaintools.com.

Each domain had a static site index, and that's what you linked to above in the screen shot. The extensive ones weren't really meant to be browsed, but just so search engines could find the pages (pre my knowledge of sitemaps). It's no different than any of the other static sitemaps, e.g. http://who.is/whois_index/index.php, and most of them looked better than the screenshot.

That one in particular came from the code for the streetsandzips site that was a big tag cloud. I was trying to find ways to make the static site better, and that was one of them. It looks better when the fonts are of different sizes :). I had intended for that site to make them different sizes based on the traffic numbers, so Google, Facebook, would be really big, etc. On the streetsandzips site the bigger cities are bigger.

In fact, I believe I evolved the sites so that those (site index) pages had noindex,follow on them such that they wouldn't come up on search results. I also added a search engine (Google custom search) on each page as well. I don't remember if I got to the tag cloud sizes for this particular domain at the time of blacklisting.

As for the misspellings, I did mess around with those, but not on all sites, and I believe at the time they were blacklisted that had been removed from most of the domains, if not all.

Common misspelling and typos as you know is a tool that people provide to those who buy domains. I built it for that purpose, and wanted to see how many people were actually searching for this stuff, so added it to some of the domains. Turns out, a lot of people do. I didn't just tack it on to the footer or cloak it or whatever; I put it in with a purpose that people ask for, e.g. common misspellings and typos.

Additionally from the users perspective, if they got to this page by typing in one of those misspellings, they were getting a big link to the official site at top and then more information about that site, e.g. siteadvisor rating, traffic, etc. So it was essentially functioning as one-click Did you mean x.

I'm happy to answer more questions about it. But it is pretty clear that it was still shoot first and ask questions later. No one ever contacted me about anything. I wasn't trying to hide anything from Google. It was all in my personal adsense account.

I can understand from a search engine perspective, banning sites. But given I already had a relationship with Google, I expected to be contacted. In fact, at one point I had a call with an Adsense guy from Google trying to help me better optimize my sites for Google! He looked at them and had no issues with them, so I thought I was fine.

Also, IIRC I submitted at least one re-inclusion request after being banned, and never heard a response back from that either. Before submitting that request I did a top to bottom review and tried to remove anything even close to the line, including misspellings I believe.

I made this over a weekend. And the people whose poetry is being captured love it. But it is auto-generated in the sense you're talking about.

It actually went down for a bit and I got a bunch of complaints, enough that I got it back up relatively quickly.

So, the better question is: what kind of startup are you building? If it's a technology startup, you will either need to commit to learning your technology space or finding a technical co-founder. Committing to learning the technology will teach you a lot about your interests, you will either love it or not - if you don't love it, you won't succeed technically (you might business wise, there are plenty of companies with shitty technology that make money).

Just some thoughts from a non-business oriented intellectual and programmer.

--you could opt-out from emails or remove yourself from the database at any time.

--you could see a detailed explanation of how every aspect of the site worked before signing up, on a page I spent countless hours writing and tweaking.

--similarly, there was a vast support system that answered almost any faq.

--you could see the whole database on our static site before signing up.