rackforms

Almost always and ironically, when something's interesting to me it's usually more difficult work and thus, contains far more unknowns, hence making estimates that much less reliable.

Years ago I was tasked with building dozens of basic web forms. Immediately recognizing the inherit silliness of this task (boring, error prone etc), I built a form creation tool, which all these years later lives on as RackForms.

Over the years the feature set grew organically to accommodate an ever growing set of demands. Yes we still build forms, but we also call into web services, display data, and so on.

Point being, RackForms and any number of other form builders are the blindingly obvious choice for this task -- it would be down right silly to code forms by hand in this era.

And yet that's what we do with the web as a whole.

Once again Microsoft seems to have had the right idea in the good old Web Forms days. Instead of coding app's you'd simply drag and drop components and add wiring code to do what you needed.

Sure it was never that easy, but it's really hard to see how it couldn't have been better given more time.

Fast forward to today and as much as I adore say, VS Code, it's really nothing more than a hyper-powerful text editor. It has none of that tolling to allow for drag and drop development, Id propose that;s the real solution to this issue - Better Tooling.

The 10 (or so) spam accounts posted about 30 times. The longest lasting survived a weekend, after which I enabled manual account activation. From start to finish the spam issue lasted around 3 weeks. Eventually, I got rid of the forum altogether.

Alas I tried all the usual things, from the disavow tool to Webmaster forums and dozens of site changes, sadly nothing helped. My penalty felt back then and still appears to be, permanent.

It may help to know pre-penalty my rank was quite high, first page for most relevant search terms. (immediately after page 20 or lower, now around page 10).

Ironically, while the rank was nice to have I never actually did anything for it.

I simply built a fast, human first(!), site that inadvertently followed Google's site quality guidelines.

For example, my software generates web forms. One common growth tactic my competitors use is placing a link at the bottom of every form back to the parent site.

Me -- I never did that. I strongly felt that under no circumstance should the output of my software be used as a marketing tool. Sure it may harm growth, but it felt right, and that was enough for me.

Years after my penalty I read just that. Google frowns upon and may penalize sites for using such "widely distributed site links".

My focus was and always has been on user, so of course I'm the one who gets penalized lol.

Anyway, I think the most damning part of the process was not having a reasonable path for knowing what exactly happened and what I could do to help.

If I were crafting legislation that's where I'd start. I can't help that Google has the market-share it does, but it does mean we all have to play within their world.

All I ask is the rules, wherever they are, are fairly, justly, and evenly applied.

In my case I had a forum (remember those!) in support of my software product.

Bots would occasionally create accounts and post links to knockoff handbags and watches. I'd tolerate (and swiftly kill!) them because our users really loved having a place to meet. (This was back in 2011, ironically, reCAPCTAHA landed in 2012)

Unbeknownst to me those links were part of a larger spam network where thousands of low-quality links pointed back to my site, presumably to those fake accounts(?).

When the penalty hit the process of trying to figure out what the heck went wrong and trying to do something about it -- identical.

In short, I've been penalized out of existence because of an obvious and in my humble opinion, easy to identify spam campaign. Sadly Google placed the cleanup burden on me, and try as I did nothing actually helped. The article's mention "hidden" penalties feels...accurate.

I often tell folks when you perform a Google search you're given worse results than you deserve. My site and goodness knows how many others have been placed so far below the fold that if we're not outright killed, we never reach the users and potential we should.

No biggie if the search market were more diverse, sadly, that is simply not the world we live in.

In my case this leaching appeared to Google as if /we/ were trying to game the system with link farms (we were not). Google penalized us in 2011 and we've yet to recover.

The point: when you use Google search you're often served sub-standard results, as over time generations of ranking penalties has lead to lower quality sites ranking higher.

The difference of course is we don't really have active and vocal "followers" in the way YouTube creators do, so for the most part, when a website owner like myself gets penalized for some abstract and out of my hand reason, or a algorithm change destroys your business overnight, it happens silently, beyond the headlines.

I can't stress this enough -- Google has been a powerful, often positive force for the wider Internet. But they're also a cruel, heartless, and often maniacal source of pain and sorrow.