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Comment by blenderob

13 hours ago

Why was the domain blacklisted though? What can we do to prevent blacklisting in the first place?

Most definitely nothing, as no sentient humans are probably involved in the process except possibly malicious people that report a site in bad faith.

If the domain is being given away for free, it will be used a lot for scams etc, so a lot of systems will just start blocking it immediately. When I got my first domain, I used one of the free TLDs and my university blocked it completely due to it being a scam. Not for any of the content on it, just the TLD being commonly used by scammers

That’s my question. I’ve launched many fresh websites that have not been marked as unsafe by Google. If they were habitually doing this, there would be far more reports of it.

I suspect there is something the author is not telling us.

  • Even if the false-positive rate is very small (e.g. 0.01%), you probably won't be affected, but more than a hundred thousand of websites would be and that would still be an issue. I have no idea how big is the false-positive rate.

    There are many of reports of the same happening to other sites, some of the top ones (you can find many more by searching HN for "google safe browsing"):

    - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45675015

From false alarm to something previous owner did. Remember domain is recycled.

  • The domain has no history as far as I could search and the site was up for almost 6 weeks with no issues before it was nuked. I used it with Apple's review process!

The big scary red warning page should at least tell you it’s phishing or malware or something else. OP didn’t have a screenshot of that. You can easily go to a safe browsing test site yourself at testsafebrowsing.appspot.com and find that Google does divulge the category of the blacklisting.

OP says:

> no gore or violence or anything of that sort

That’s not even the right criteria. OP is confused about Google Safe Browsing vs Safe Search.