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Site Redesigned Because Google Hates co.cc

A lot has happened and now we present you with a brand new site design with a brand new domain name which we’ll refer to as site address. If you have visited before on www.theaitenshiproject.co.cc, it’s time to update your bookmarks to http://www.aitenshiproject.com. As you can see, with the design, bigger fonts for dummies like me. Well as some say, the bigger, the better. Well in my case, the site design is now bigger, but not necessarily better. As of this writing, we’re still not finished with the design, but I think it’s a good start for a new site address.

For a little background on why we had to change address, well, the reason is that Google completely blocked off co.cc addresses from its search results two months ago. If you try to search any sub-domain under co.cc, you won’t find anything. If you don’t believe me, then try these search queries:

The reason for this is that Google aims to bring quality results from its infamous search engine, which means penalizing or even removing completely an entire domain from its results when proven abusive. For the record, co.cc is very lenient about its abuse/spam policy, which gives us the reason why many sites use it for spam and phishing. Even though co.cc denies that they have a lot of abusive sites, many people and institutions doesn’t think so. The bad side is that even legitimate websites that use co.cc services are affected of this action, including me.

Personally, I think Google’s action is reasonable. Even though some legit sites have been affected, I think it is a good way to remove a significant percentage of phishing websites from Google’s index, though I think it is a lazy approach. Webmasters should be given the chance to appeal to re-index their sites back to Google if proven to be a site following Google’s quality guidelines. Earlier, Facebook also blocked co.cc from using its services for the same reason as Google, but gave a chance for users to appeal. I know the corporate group of co.cc is still in panic and I think it will be a long battle for them. For the meantime, enjoy the new site design.

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Relief From the Agony of Facebook Blacklisted Domains

Black Facebook

Black FacebookLast month, I wrote about how Facebook indiscriminately blocks domains from its blacklist even if majority of its subdomains are legitimate websites and not abusive. I was one of those webmasters who were affected by that seemingly tight policy. Facebook Like Buttons won’t work on those affected sites, even share the URL won’t work.

But recently, I found out that my website was somehow lifted from the blacklist. I’m not sure on what happened, but I can now share permalinks from my website to Facebook. I can even put some Like Buttons on my articles and it works! But I think the Like Button on the home page still doesn’t work, when I click the button (see the Like Button on the left), it shows that I like the page then will revert back to zero likes after about a second. Well, I won’t complain about that for now since at least I can use some functionalities of the API on a co.cc website. It seems that they’ve modified their method of checking for an abusive website, I noticed that before I can share a link, it popups a captcha before the link is shared. I can say that this is a better way of checking for abuse instead of blocking everything at once.

As of now, I haven’t researched anything about these changes yet, but so far it’s getting better. Well done Facebook Developer Team!! For those who were also blocked before, can you access the API thru your website now?