According to SearchEngineLand.com, “Google has discussed giving searchers the ability to remove domains from its search results.”
They attribute that from a discussion held by Hacker News user “bradly” asks who “asked Matt Cutts if Google would consider letting searchers remove domains from search results themselves. Cutts replies, “we’ve definitely discussed this,” and seems to hint that some kind of announcement may be on the way:”
Matt,Can you speak about the possibility for personal domain blacklists for Google accounts? I know giving users the option to remove sites from their own search results is talked about a lot in these HN threads. Is there any talk internally about implementing something like this?
[Matt’s reply] We’ve definitely discussed this. Our policy in search quality is not to pre-announce things before they launch. If we offer an experiment along those lines, I’ll be among the first to show up here and let people know about it. 🙂
“”
If Google were to allow users to blacklist domains it would obliviously hurt the value of the domain itself.
Google has its own list of blacklisted domains but it also has a method for getting the domain de-listed.
If users are allowed to blacklist a domain or groups of domains it would appear that those users would never see that URL again, thereby possibly greatly reducing the value of that particular domain.
Uuuummmm, if I black list a domain because I don’t like the site, why would it affect value, I was never going back there any ways or doing business. I see nearly no good use for this app, I mean how many porn sites can a parent or wife block lol
Josh
The site might change.
So while people might block LLL.com because its a page full of ads then say someone buys it and develops it into a site its remains blocked by the user
You porn site example lets say dirty.com which is a parked domain we own is bought by a cleaning company or someone who wants to make a gossip site, if 100,000 have blocked it because it was a porn site that’s going to effect the value of the domain.
a new service: GoogleCensorship
Well not actually Google would allow users to censor.
I see what you mean Michael but it is a HUGE stretch in thinking it may even actually be an issue at all and if it’s a 1 in a million senario affecting nearly no one.
Furthermore if the dirty.com domain for example was black lited by a user and a non adult end user bought it and offer say soap, who is to say the parent/wife who black listed it was ever going to dirty.com to look for soap.
Sorry but the more I type the less of an issue this is at all for the industry, unless you are a huge natural adult domain or high ranking, even still.
Power to the people. How great would a little blacklist button on my google toolbar be.
Obviously this would hurt parked domains and it would be interesting to see if google would collect this data and how it would impact serps. If 20,000 people blacklist a domain, how could google not push it down the page? As for me ehow.com and wrongdiagnosis.com would be the first to go.
Mike
I would expect that Google would in fact collect the information and use it to in determining how sites would rank.
What is a company did a viral campaign for users to block a competitors site?
What if someone published a blog post that offended someone and started a campaign for users to block it, to punish the site?
Not to get repetative, but… Told ya so.
The only concern with crowdsourcing this is that it makes the system ripe for gigantic abuse against small to medium sized online enterprises. Expect to see black-hat “delisting campaigns” to be employed by one interest against a competing interests.
For the legitimate use of the system, though… if you have a crappy website that serps high right now, bend over…
Mike I agree with you on things
With the amount of type inn traffic people have that type in traffic will continue to rise in value. Big portfolios like you, rick, frank and ham. The .com power plays increase imo
This will hurt for these mini site developers imo. Or people who claim to be developers or calling themselves a website development business.
Scary in google considering this and it would be flawed as well.
Good points, I was thinking the same thing, a huge new business would be born.
It could be called something like “blamming” – black list spamming.
As fast a social media spreads things, a site could get in hot water real quickly. It could get ugly.
What a business model. Recruit 50,000 associates, some one pays you $X,XXX and 50,000 people blacklist a domain. 5,000 a week for 10 weeks. Ouch.
Do no evil..so I am gonna block google site.
I think such a process could be abused. Almost like flagging a site, or a comment. (IMO) Some may try to blacklist a site because it represents a strategy to reduce competition. Definitely an unfavorable process.
What if parked domains are removed? They don’t serve any quality purpose besides making money. There will be massive problems if a decision is made to move on with the process.
@Mike
eHow is too powerful to get blacklisted. They are one of the most profitable companies (Demand Media) online. IMO, they would fight against a blacklist. IMO, I think there is too much risk involved to move on with such a process.
GOOGLE THE MONOPOLY:
Compliance …
Its the latest, its the greatest …
NEW IMPROVED self imposed CENSORSHIP
Unlike Big Brother this would be a case of Little Brother
IMITATING a self imposed Internet restriction of Free search
(self imposed)
Little Brother copying Big Brother as lesser siblings tend to do.
So now on a … International level all the Internet cafes …
and other public PC’s would have a little BUTTON that the regime
of the moment could simply,
“Blacklist any and all topics ,rivals, competitors and,
politically not connected cohorts.
On he strength of a virus / cookie you may be able to eliminate
a competitors simple URL PATH and Website to a 404 or redirect to another
site that would reap the profit.
If it walks like Big Brother …Talks like Big Brother
somewher over your shoulder …
it probably is BIG BROTHER.
I believe only if millions of users block a certain site/domain, it would have impact on the value of the site/domain. If hundreds or thousands of users block the site/domain, it might not make a lot of difference.
What if parked domains are removed? They don’t serve any quality purpose besides making money.
—
They will be. That’s the entire point.
A decent strategy to get ahead of the deindexing voting scheme- for domainers who have large portfolios of quality domains that may have some index mojo but little/no meaningful content- is to sit down with a pot of coffee and your inventory list, develop a series of topical matrices, figure out what your ‘alpha name’ is in each matrix then mid/full scale it. Redirect all other names in that matrix to the developed alpha name with a masked 301.
If you’re ranking due to the domain alone (possibly with old BLs, or whatever), this strategy should be enough to keep the serp fires burning without risking deindex votes since you’ll be piping the serp traffic to meaningful content, but you’re first going to make something meaningful to link in to, which is where domainers usually fail.
I believe only if millions of users block a certain site/domain, it would have impact on the value of the site/domain. If hundreds or thousands of users block the site/domain, it might not make a lot of difference.
—
A large part of the crowing this whole scheme is in response to is that keyword niches are often dominated in serp by domainer and sham-developer garbage which, frankly, they are. Some topics only receive a thousand bang-on searches per month. The algo will undoubtedly weigh the “bad” votes against the broader search volume within a particular keyword index. Translation (and prediction): It will take many more “bad” votes to deindex “Free Porn” than it will “Portable Dishwashers For Sale In Tallahassee”
Censorship in ANY form is CENSORSHIP!
THIS WOULD BE “Creeping Censorship”
mind training for eventual goverment
CENSORSHIP acceptance.
DON’T ALLOW IT!
If my sites can be banned by users then I think Google should also be “bannable” equally on its own index results. Imagine how many disgruntled internet marketers are ITCHING to blacklist the big dawg.
But I know if anyone tries that inexplicable events will start to occur.
“Somewhere your family members will start disappearing one by one. Your brand new Acer super laptop with the new I7 Pentium chip will crash and burn just from opening email.
And a sink hole will swallow your brand new car in the driveway.”
On second thought; I think I will leave Google alone.
Who needs that much grief?
Have you ever placed and ad on Craigslist? Before stepping into the IM arena. I sold used cars. I was the Internet Manager for a Good sized Used Car Dealership in Memphis.
I made a lot of money off of craigslist. I only posted my ads in the Used Car Dealer Section, 10 to 15 different cars a day. My ads were all within in Craigslist TOS. Some Days I would have over half of my ads flagged. The competetion or the locals who knows would just wipe you out some days.
But this idea had the potential to be much much worse.
If i had a dollar for every time someone sounded an alarm that the sky for domains is falling, i’d big rich.
🙂
no one knows how the Google SE software works, so, we can’t we be sure that Google doesn’t already censor some site and give advantages to other sites (like, its own sites and/or the sites of companies that pay more)
I could care less about Google, 98% of my traffic is type-in anyhow. If my domains are not in Google than nobody can mark them as being bad at Google anyhow.
Google is getting extremely complicated. Eventually Google will be so hard to figure out from an SEO perspective that SEO will be a defunct skill. SEO guys and gals will begin to throw their hands up in frustration.
I predict that there will be a big business revolt against G once SEO becomes futile and as their rules become increasingly absurd or tough to follow.
FX
You Are Rich
That will turn Google into a social media search engine.
They collect who likes and dislikes websites. They use that data to “improve” search results if the data gets weighted in that direction. They sell that data aggreated with your account data if you have one. Either way, they know more about you. Some people like this, but most people value their privacy.
CEO’s are not allowed to “leave money on the table” instead of turing it into revenue. They get fired if they do not gather up the money for the stockholders.
Just another day on the Internet.
Hi,
Here is an idea… How about everyone “blacklist” Google…. No more setting your home page to Google, No more paying for their over priced PPC adds etc…
News Flash:
Google’s normal “organic” results have gone down hill the past two years, not because of: so call “spam mini websites”…it has gone downhill, because almost every search you do has results from pages from 2000- 2008 and at least 1-2 of the 1st 10 results are from “Wikipedia”… and with their “own ad spam”…lot of searches with 3 top paid ads and then 5-10 ads down the right side.
There “oragnic” results now are NOT that much better than “Bing” or even “Ask….and in a lot of case’s are much worse.
And talk about “Ad Spam”…….every page is nothing but “ad spam”….hows that.
If they can make up what they think a “spam website is or is not”….I reserve the right to do the same thing to call all their PPC ads “Spam”
Facebook’s ad system in better than Googles,(if used correctly) and if they ever move it to the area…so the ads can be published on websites like (adsense) they will bury Googles (adsense)…
Most everyone I know, cannot compete with keywords that cost $.050 – $12 a click…getting a 3% CTR and the converting that 3% into enough sales…to make a profit, covering the cost of the PPC ad campaign, overhead etc…
That is why…people, small business are starting to “migrate”….
“SEO EXPERTS” love Google, because Google justifies their mere existence… by trying to do crap like this…and change the way the index websites…every 7 minutes….
“SEO” would not even exist…if you did not have to try and “Jump Through Googles Hoops” almost on a daily basis.
“SEO” should really be called” “WSO”….(website optimization)…Not enough attention is paid to the proper design of a website it self…without taken in consideration what Google likes or dislikes…
_____
The “Migration” is already starting to happen:
JC Penny moved their entire 250K product line on to Facebook…where you can shop and buy anything they have to sale.
***J. C. Penney Moves Entire Product Catalog to Facebook***(not my site)
http://www.practicalecommerce.com/blogs/post/788-J-C-Penney-Moves-Entire-Product-Catalog-to-Facebook
____
And on another note, here is a quote from “adage”…. The “Migration” has already started…it might not effect Google to much…in the short term…but give it a year….
Here is a quote from: adage……
” According to an estimate from eMarketer, Facebook took in $1.86 billion in worldwide advertising revenue for 2010, a 151% increase over the company’s estimated 2009 advertising revenue of $740 million worldwide. Not surprisingly, the majority of that, $1.21 billion, was earned inside the U.S.”
“But what is surprising is the majority of revenue, 60% or $1.12 billion, was earned from smaller companies in 2010, those more likely to be using self-serve tools rather than work through a media agency. That’s greater than the $740 million coming from major marketers like Coke, P&G or Match.com”
______
If this comes off as a “Google Rant”….That is beacuse it is.
Right or wrong….I have not had a good one (Google rant) since 2007-2008 when “FS” was blogging almost everyday at “Sevenmile”…
I know this post is a ‘bit’ unprofessional…and on that account, I do apologize for.
But I just needed to get it out of my system, 3 years with out a good “Google rant” was just a bit too long for me to take…lol
Best To All,
Dan
Last week I had a back and forth exchange with Google support, the first in 6 years since I started internet marketing. Google has terrible customer service and whenever you come across a tactic or software that you want to check with them there is no Google contact me button.
Just a finger (not the middle one) pointing at the FAQ and TOS section. The exchange made me feel like I am their enemy and not worth their time.
Businesses can hit or fail based solely on customer service. Google got away with it for less than 10 years. Now is the time in business lifespan where you have to innovate and become a stable part of people’s lives.
BUT from the above comments if we had a choice; How many would truly vote for Google to stay?
The user (who Google has been chasing after) has deserted them for Face Book because of interactivity. Google has now turned on its lover (us internet marketers) and blamed us for the desertion.
I think Google has missed the big picture and the picture is that they are no longer relevant and they are going to become more sour as time goes. I think the founder of Facebook might have been an internet marketer who Google made jump through hoops. Who is the one laughing now…
I on the other hand have discovered DOMAINING this past 3 months and I say this to Google:- SEEEYA LATER Alligator! Wouldn’t wanna be ya!
there’s too much potential for abuse here if this is enabled. just think of all the black hatters out there that can take advantage of this – bots anyone?
i could already see this. it’s too easy.
get people to blacklist for $.25 and take out your competition for $500. you’ll see this in fiverr.com – better yet, start a new company to do just this. pay them $500 and your competition is gone.
Hi SE,
I think Yahoo or MSMlive tried something like this some years ago… maybe it was “Altavista…not sure.
But I do know who ever did it….It was a complete disaster…beacuse of most the things you mentioned in your post.
Good post…
Best,
dan
It’s not bad enough that Google can ban domains, now we want to let everyone get in on the fun? Great, let the games begin…!
This is the worst idea since they decided that links should be treated like “votes” for sites.