Google recently flagged my content-curation startup as "Pure Spam", even though it only takes small snippets from the original sources, is 100% human curated, and always links back to the true original source.
Not only are the curated pages blocked, but the entire domain is blocked as "pure spam". People who use Google to find a domain instead of typing the full URL now can't find it anywhere.
These assholes are just being anti-competitive now.
You won't find it on Google :) We're making a products recommendation site, focusing on goal-oriented decisions. We'll make the full announcement within the next couple of weeks.
This reminds me. Google is really killing the "release early and release often" approach, if people will now have to do a ton of SEO learning and tweaking to avoid having your MVP permanently banned at launch day.
"Google is really killing the "release early and release often" approach, if people will now have to do a ton of SEO learning and tweaking to avoid having your MVP permanently banned at launch day."
Judging by the downvotes this is not a legitimate concern? Why?
Actually, from an SEO perspective, the #1 principle Google follows is preventing "release often" from being effective for SEO.
Talk to anyone who makes money at PPC and they will tell you one thing. You make a campaign, measure the results, change it a little, measure the results, and make incremental improvements to make a profitable campaign.
If you could do that with SEO, SEO would be a lot easier. Google, therefore, has a number of mechanisms (some patented) that cause all hell to break loose if you make the kind of changes to your site that you'd use to incrementally improve it's SEO.
It's one of the reason we are stuck with crappy sites like answers.com, w3schools, and wrongdiagnosis, because once a site like that is successful, the operators are loathe to make any changes lest their rankings drop.
Depending on what products you're talking about, you should see if it competes in any way with Google's paid results on product searches. If there is any crossover, the USDOJ might be happy to hear what you have to say.
Not only are the curated pages blocked, but the entire domain is blocked as "pure spam". People who use Google to find a domain instead of typing the full URL now can't find it anywhere.
These assholes are just being anti-competitive now.