Domain investor and serial entrepreneur Mike Mann published his book Make Millions & Make Change in 2009 and has been giving it away for free on MakeMillions.com
Last week Google blacklisted the domain.
Mike Mann pulled the plug on MakeMillions.com in response and the domain name now does not resolve.
The domain MakeMillions.com cost Mike $10,000 and now lays dead due to Google’s arbitrary action.
Mike switched all the content that was on MakeMillions.com to MakeMillionsandmakechange.com
Mike posted this to his Facebook page.
“Do no evil? Google blacklisted my free book full of great content and charitable intent, no ads at www.MakeMillions.com because their robots kept thinking its a get rich quick scheme even after explaining to their execs. But its the best free commercial free content they have. I lost 10K on the domain, plus a million dollar brand and was forced by their evil to rebrand as www.makemillionsmakechange.com”
The is also a thread on DnForum.com dedicated to the subject.
Another example of how Google can ultimately control the success or failure of many businesses and projects.
It is getting to be quite ominous, menacing, foreshadowing, portentous, fateful, ill-boding, inauspicious, menacing, minatory, … in short, alarming!
We’re going to need congressional assistance.
I’ll go make the popcorn
Oh BTW, Berkens:
I’m beginning to have a rethink on the NgTLDs (New gTLDs, the so called .Brand).
I’m still in the initial stage of analyzing the dawn thing.
It appears to me that Google is afraid of them. It could, if successful change consumer behavior. In essence, consumers may go back to type-ins. For example, why search Google when you can easily type in sales.Domenclature, or blonde.sex, or even, make.money?
So, that’s one aspect that I’m beginning to like. Besides, I truly believe that the powers that be are determined to change the landscape. That includes ICANN, foreign countries that want to cut American down to size, by taking away the internet hegemony of the United States. So, we may not have a choice than to embrace this thing. I will write about this in full at some point. Thank you.
How can they be scared of new gTLD’s when they were one of the largest applicants with over 100?
They aren’t scared
They are leading the charge over to right of the dot.
The link you used for “www.makemillionsmakechange.com” triggers a Facebook “Please Be Careful” warning. I don’t think Google is Mike Mann’s only problem!
Berkens:
Come on! What does one do when they are scared? What does one do when you can’t beat them?
The answer is: YOU JOIN THEM, duh!!!
It’s a defensive, hedging move on their part.
Imagine when everyone knows their destination. Very little searching. Think!
The domain MakeMillions.com resolves just fine, it forwards to the long tail version.
To find out if a domain has been black-listed, enter “site:MakeMillions.com” in Google. If there are no results, Google has de-indexed it, as it’s the case with this domain.
Oh, and DomainGang wrote about it two days ago 😛
Acro
The domain was not resolving this morning
i think domainers themselves have a lot of responsibility for people using the type-in less and less. the general crappiness of most parked pages might best be decribed as a dozen clicks to nowhere.
This is anti-trust behavior if I ever saw it. The FTC has been taking it up the tailpipe from Google because someone’s palm is getting greased (to say nothing of the aforementioned back-end (double entendre))!!! Maybe Europe will have to lead the way and finally bust this company to pieces before the US takes any action.
And what about California? Don’t their laws apply to Google, or are Mountain View, San Jose and Santa Clara now the triad that is the de facto capital of the California Republic?
I honestly have no idea how to fight this; maybe an industry crisis dialogue?
Who knows. Rick, I’ll take some of that popcorn.
Even Mike Mann will admit he can’t beat Google……maybe and Acro, unfortunately it’s not news until Berkens prints it. He’s our Google 🙂
Now when you now search for MakeMillions.com on Google, MakeMillionsMakeChange.com comes up as the first search result. So blacklisting it doesn’t seem to have done much good.
Michael Bauser wrote:
> The link you used for “www.makemillionsmakechange.com” triggers
> a Facebook “Please Be Careful” warning. I don’t think Google is Mike
> Mann’s only problem!
That’s because the link is mistakenly routed through Facebook, and isn’t a direct link. That’s the standard warning Facebook gives to anyone going to an external site from their site.
The domain has just been deindexed by Google but it’s still reachable (luckily Google can’t control DNS yet), so Mike Mann’s $10k investment is still there, it just forwards to the longer domain. And I agree with Acro: a simple “site:domain.com” will let you know if domain.com has been deindexed or not.
I guess if Mike was running ads late night for his free book – Google would have no problem – because it would be “Legit” 🙂
MakeMillions.com is gold – and Platinum Gold especially after Google starts indexing the 100 Trillion new TLDs.
Wake up followers – it is pure genius making tons of money owning a new gTLD registry and in doing so making your own (and everybody else’s) .com portfolio worth exponentially more.
And that makes the popcorn taste even better 🙂
My biggest hope for priority draw day is that .Google gets a top 50 slot.
Its a per application drawn not a per applicant draw so with almost 100 applications there is a very good chance that at least 1 will land in the top 50
Yes, but I’m hoping it is their marquis brand and they launch it quickly with vigor.
Also of course that would be after the IDNs.
His book/site sound like a bad Kevin Trudeau infomercial. Call me skeptical, but I doubt Mr. Mann is some charitable saint. Profit is his motive. Yes, I’ve seen the foundations he claims on his website. Even if they exist, which I don’t assume to be the case, tax shelters are nothing new. I wonder aloud how much money gets to the intended causes and how much does a big loop back to Mr. Mann, tax exempt? My point? I highly doubt Google blacklisted his site for no good reason.
So Paul – You have defined exactly what non-profits are – I agree – the only difference is the officers get all the money in the form of payroll vs. shareholder dividends – and the government loves that because they collect more in taxes.
But that does not give google the right to de-list and de-index 🙂
It looks like MM did it himself by having duplicate content and his use of meta description to promote the longer domain thereby giving that site a higher scoring. I thought everyone knew Google sometimes drops sites with duplicate content?
Please quit blaming Google! There is a missing starting paragraph tag, and some hidden text in comments that is missing an ending tag, and some tags aren’t bracketing right, with a deindexed link sapha which looks like hidden text which leads me to believe this site is victim of hacker code injection, or a template update which needs cleaning.
Mike Mann, who is sapha?
safa.com is logging/analytics site that seems to be dead. There are large numbers of HTML errors when you run it through the validator but that should not get him deindexed and any malware Google detects would show up on webmaster tools. Did he even check webmaster tools before called Google “executives”?
All he needs to do is hire some high school kid who knows what he/she is doing.
Here is a tweet as reference:
https://twitter.com/spencelewis/status/2553677128
Here is snapshot of the old website for Sapha
http://web.archive.org/web/20080724131010/http://www.sapha.com
Are you a friend of Spencer Lewis, @ Mike Mann? Or, you used Sapha services at one time?
Or your nephew.
LooseBucksWinWhat?.com – from a domain guy, the second coming seems a tad convoluted! But I guess it’s a WYSIWYG dot com 🙂
And don’t forget … this guy owns SEO.com.
How does a $10k domain became worthless when Google de-indexed it ?
I thought domain names had value outside of a google indexing.
Exactly Adam – and the domain is worth a heck of a lot more than 10K or whatever
In the end it all points to direct navigation and tradional marketing (like billboards) vs. for example PPC ads on smart phones that already are paying 20% on the dollar instead of laptops
It almost seems as if Google it overengineering it sucess.
In summary, it’s not Google. It’s the broken tags, and reference to Sapha. Now I see the connection: Chris Knudsen, Vice-president of Marketing for SEO, was vice-president of Sapha. Maybe any reference to Sapha flags the Google crawler, because Sapha is on Google’s master list of blacklisted SEO companies!
I think he put up a duplicate site and Google chose the older, more established site as the primary site and dropped the other one. The other site is completly indexed so all you need to do is follow the Google procedure for changing your domain name and check Google webmaster tools for any issues.
This is a good system because if someone comes along and duplicates your web site Google will probably drop them from the index because the older site is more established and has a higher score.
It’s a bitter pill to have to fix bad SEO and have my skills referred to as those of “some high school kid who knows what he/she is doing.” By way of friendly gesture, here is the suggestion:
Go to View/Source and copy and paste the code into a txt file.
Check every comment tag and paragraph tag – <!– or – and make sure it’s mate – –> or closes out before different tags interfere.
Delete all mentions of Sapha.
I am picking this post as the main stgory for our Monday newsletter to help expose this true injustice.
This kind of drama is what pushed me to abandon developing .
I was simply tired to have my business based on the Google lottery!
It’s horrible, you can be working hard for years, doing the things right and one day their algorythm find your site suspect for any reason and overnight his serp fall down into the troublion or worst, finish black listed.
And this is why I am starting my own search engine. This monopoly must end.
Google has blacklisted my domain Mashcor.com too, so I am building a frigging media empire around the name and all available extensions.
I too will blacklist Google on my Search engine because of their anti-trust behaviour.
I have not read any of the responses above but I do not understand why Google has not been challenged with a huge multi billion dollar class action lawsuit. Google has never, IMO, had to take any responsibility for their actions. They just do as they please. That might have been fine 10 years ago but their bizarre black box decisions effect thousands of businesses worldwide. I for one am very uneasy about putting years into a few ecommerce sites only to have Google shut them down without any explanation.
Who in the F–K do they think they are? They’re sick with power.
I’m afraid the comments blasting Google show many domainers’ ignorance and make the domain industry look like a bunch of whiners.
Google doesn’t blacklist sites because they’re about making money or getting rich.
That’s clearly not what happened here.
Has any SEO’ Pros commented on this ?
(aside here)
I am curious to read their take…
Please Rick
Not too much butter!
By the way
Has anyone read Mike’s book
I had a domain that I noticed was dropped from the Google index. I put up some content and followed the directions in webmaster tools. It took about 12 hours to get back into the index.
EmergingDomains – I was not comparing your SEO to that of a high school kid. However, if I had a choice I would choose the high school kid. The kid will just follow the Google directions instead of coming up with wild theories that Google penalized sites for putting in a link to a certain company they do not like or that some hacker did something.
They are against the control internet, they want internet open, they want freedom of speech. So why they control the search results? Even if it is a get rich quick scheme let’s the audience decide whether to trust on the source or not.
Convert your domain name into a petition site against the control search results policy and let the world see and comment in favor or against it.
@ Help, Glad you can find qualified help!
Thanx, @ MHB, for hosting this blog. One learns something new every day. It didn’t occur to me Google might flag a blacklisted SEO company until this discussion. Since Google crawler recognizes patterns, it stands to reason it may take down sites with blacklisted urls in the code, as well as SEO violations themselves.
For instance, Epik sites were taken down en masse – it had to be some pattern within the code, or server or name which sparked the recognition.
Google execs got involved? Who was investigating this matter… Larry Page?
So, this is how it is. I hope I’m wrong, and that the banned url which doesn’t resolve doesn’t have anything to do with the blacklisting.
Because I wandered to another of Michael Mann’s websites, and looked at the code, and – oh-oh! – there is a mention of the same! If I am right, it might be the tip of the iceberg, and other of MM’s sites start getting banned . . . Hope not.
I don’t think Mike should have changed up domains so quickly.
Big brands like BMW and popular internet blogger John Chow have been blacklisted by Google in the past and were able to recover (http://www.shoemoney.com/2009/07/16/google-gives-in-to-john-chow-proves-ends-justify-the-means).
Also, don’t you think redirecting a blacklisted domain will negatively impact http://www.makemillionsmakechange.com/ ??
Andrew, you are wrong, they did blacklist because of name/content, a robot did it and an idiotic person who didnt research probably approved it and failed to fix it, never read actual content and thought the thing was “get rich quick” scheme, which it certainly is not.
Although criminal hacker Daniel Fainman claims he had it done (via an anonymous email without his name)