Update: The issue has been resolved already, seobook.com is reinstated.
While I enthusiastically joined Mixx and participated eagerly since then one thing strikes me as more than unusual: It seems that one of the most renown SEO authorities, Aaron Wall of SEO Book has his domain seobook.com banned at Mixx! I wanted to submit his hugely popular SEO Guide for bloggers which has been bookmarked at del.icio.us 1156 times as of now and it’s “not valid“.
When I join a community and spend some substantial amount of time on supporting it, filling it with content and basically working for free for it I do not like to encounter such strange surprises.
I assume it’s the Beta that strikes here again, as there are apparently some other issues right now, e.g. I can’t vote in FireFox 1.5 and Mixx does not work in Opera 9. It certainly does not make sense to ban one of the best SEO sites whatsoever.
This is exactly where Digg has failed among others, in differentiating between worthless SEO spam and valuable SEO content that empowers bloggers and webmasters to succeed online.
I hope Mixx won’t follow the same path of failure.
The screenshot above shows the submit dialog of Mixx. If you attempt to submit a page from seobook.com you get a
Sorry, the URL you are attempting to submit is not valid on our system.
To double check I used the homepage URL and it did not work either. As the URL does not seem in any ways atypical to me or broken, StumbleUpon for instance can’t handle some URLs, like not optimized Joomla ones e.g. it must be a mistake. It sure is interesting how this glitch happened. Did someone file an abuse report and seobook.com was automatically banned?
Disclosure: I’m a SEO Book affiliate and have complained in the past about the poor sales of it on my site.
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This thing has 14 Comments
Could it be Mixx don’t want any commercial related entries?
I actually emailed them about the very same issue a week or so ago and they said:
“Based on the error message that is coming back, it seems that our content filters (a 3rd party solution we use) is catching it. Let me check with our engineers and see what category the content filters have put on the site.”
I assume they never resolved it..
They told me the same about one of my websites, but they never answered back and my website is blocked from mixx
It was a bug and they have corrected the situation!
Mixx is not evil or bias! :)
Great. I updated the post.
@Mark Fulton
LOL Social Media is all about evil and bias :)
The bug was corrected!
I am having the same problem everyone claims is fixed. When I emailed them 2 weeks ago I got no reply. Then magically it was fixed 10 hours ago. I was able to submit one of my pages. But as soon as I was able to submit, the problem has started up again. My site can not be listed. And if their filters are calling my blog spam, I’d love to know what they are basing this on. Are they just looking for specific keywords or what? This has actually hurt my website a great deal and I have already had 8 people tell me about the problem from my website :O(
I keep getting the message “We’re not sure where you found this, but it doesn’t appear to be a web page. Want to give it another try?
Strange as it used to accept my site and Technorati, Delicious, Stumbleupon, etc all accept it! I contacted them about two weeks ago about this but so far no reply, hopefully they will sort it soon.
I’m getting the same problem :(
“Sorry, the URL you are attempting to submit is not valid on our system. “
Well that’s just really odd. I’m surprised they would ban such an authority site. I’ll have to go give it a try and see if it works now days.
I recently joined Mixx and have posted some interesting news related to technology, futurists, sports. Today, every submission I try to make from established news sites like Reuters, AP, LiveScience, etc, I get this:
“We’re not sure where you found this, but it doesn’t appear to be a web page. Want to give it another try?”
I don’t know if this is a bug or if somehow my account was mistakenly ID’d as a spammer (I have not submitted anything commercial, but these social media sites seem fickle and arbitrary when some moderator doesn’t like your username or is in a bad mood).
Kevin: No, that’s a bug I’ve seen over the years. Mixx can’t deal with some URLs especially if they have too many parameters.
urrgh, having the same problem with a non SEO related site.
It gets through the original URL parsing screen, but then after filling in info for the site I tried, it then gives the error, and then when I try to submit again, it appears blocked on the first submission page and will go no further. At least if they provided a more informative error, it would be less frustrating.
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