Nucite Network

I mentioned in a previous post that due to foobar being a common placeholder name, there are a ton of daily emails sent to the address foo@bar.com.  The fact is, due to that same situation, there are also a number of inbound links to both bar.com/foo and foo.bar.com.  Most of these are coming in from forum posts where programmers are communicating concepts with one another.  I threw up a simple page that asked "What were you expecting to see here?" along with a Google AdSense search box at foo.bar.com.  I also redirected traffic from bar.com/foo to the same spot.  I really just wanted to see how much traffic it actually got... and where the traffic was coming from.  Turns out, not a big deal.  About 5 - 10 people a day were coming through to those 2 URLs.

The owner of Bar.com and I talked about the email situation and he told me the brief story of the foo, which has recently replaced the simple search page.  Because most programmer geeks would probably find it interesting (or at least mildly entertaining), we did a Digg and a Reddit for the new page.  The Digg got absolutely no traction, but the Reddit took off fast and landed a link on the home page there for about an hour.  And it was at the top of the Geek category there for just over a day.  There was a 24 hour time period there where that domain got about 5,000 unique visitors.  And since that day, we're now averaging about 50 visitors to that page.

I made this post just to communicate how much of an impact a simple post to these social bookmarking-type services can have.  Now if we could only do the same for the money making pages...

Shortly after agreeing with the owner of Bar.com to develop his (truly amazing) domain, he came back to me with some unfortunate news - some time ago the had been banned from Google.  Given the fact that we would be expecting a great deal of search volume from them, he told me there would be no hard feelings if I opted out of development on that domain.  However, I had never seen the process of getting unbanned unfold.  So I was happy to go forward and see what would happen.

When I first got my hands on the domain it was being parked.  So rather than go to Google to ask for reconsideration at that point, we decided it would be best to first get some of the initial development complete so that they could see what our true intentions were with the domain.  So after a little development time I got a basic ecommerce solution in place with a popular affiliate that met our needs perfectly.  To the incoming visitor, the site had begun to take shape and we were ready to be reconsidered.

The request went in and the process seemed to go smoothly.  Within only a couple weeks we saw the first pages start to get indexed in Google.  It was a happy time until I soon realized that they were not fully trusting the site yet.  The total number of pages indexed for the site would jump up to hundreds or thousands one day and then plummet back to single digits the next.  The true damage that a Google ban does for a site became a harsh reality.

Oh well, let's make the best of it.  It's time to strategize on how we can get Google to respect us again.  My guess is that time (coupled with quality and evolving content) is the best medicine.

Shortly after launching a developed version of Bar.com I quickly noticed that the server itself was slowing down rapidly.  It was working overtime... on something.  The first thing I did was check some analytics to see just how much traffic the web site was getting.  It was pretty normal.  Then I checked some server logs and quickly realized the problem.

Do you know what foo or foobar means?  I don't mean the college term relating to a state of drunkenness... that one's spelled a bit differently.  It's kind of difficult to put into lay terms, but for our purposes here, it's a term programmers use when they're trying to communicate (via text) how a certain concept is conveyed through code (well, basically that's what it means... like I said, tough to explain).

Before I get back to foobar, let's talk about SPAM for a minute.  Chances are that you've heard spam bots go out and search for email addresses on web pages so that they can spam the hell out of that address.  Right?  Okay, back to foobar...

As programmers are trying to communicate to on another over the Internet via forums, newsgroups, etc, they sometimes use the email address foo@bar.com to convey their concept.  Google shows about 76,000 web pages that show that email address.

No wonder the server slowed down.  It was getting an average of a few emails per second to that address.  All, of course, were obvious spam.  Imagine if your email address was plastered all over 76,000 web sites.