But, as much as I'd like this website to be a destination, it will never be one.
Good, Cheap and Fast was profiled by big name websites like Fast Company and Kottke. These media mentions drove hundreds of thousands of visits. Nevertheless, if someone who was referred to this website two years ago is looking for a cheap portable generator today, he or she is much more likely to Google "cheap portable generator" than to come to my homepage.
It's understandable. Alas, without search visibility, this site in invisible.
Can a Domain Be Cursed?
I did my due diligence before I registered goodcheapandfast.com. It had no backlink history and it had only existed previously as a parked domain in 2013. There are no obvious skeletons in this domain's closet, yet strange things have been afoot, almost since day one.
For example, Bing didn't even index this website's homepage a month after Good, Cheap and Fast was linked to from websites like Esquire and Slate. I contacted bingwb@microsoft.com with my concerns and received this response:
Good day and thank you for your patience while we investigated the issue.
Firstly, I am happy to provide you information that our product review group succeeded in removing the block of the site. After submitting your site to be reviewed the team has decided to lift the block. Please allow up to 2-3 weeks for your site to be crawled indexed and serving again.
I am unable to provide you the specifics of the block as our product review team does not share details of the block.
The mystery didn't end there. Two years later, this website has received fewer than 100 total referrals from Bing. That's not normal and neither is this: Since 2019, pages on this website started dropping in-and-out of Google's results. An article that ranked #1 would disappear entirely, then reappear, then disappear, then reappear. These were like mini strokes. Sometimes the traffic bounced back in full; other times it gradually faded away.
from Hacker News https://ift.tt/3qNw5g9
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