Nope.. They were hell bent on shutting down the site at any cost. My site wasn't the only site targetted by this manufactuer. Others remain running, they just made changes to comply with the car maker. I could have made the changes they requested (changed domain names, removed some links, changed some graphics, etc), but at that point I just decided to throw in the towel and focus on my business instead.
I've dealt with some manufacturers like that. Even ones I buy directly from! They're usually pretty clueless as to how business is done on the Web.
I appreciate the feedback/ discussion about my site. I really don't think I have anything to worry about as far as the domain name is concerned. There are many good site out there with google in the title. Plus, I clearly state that the site is not endorsed or affiliated with Google in any way. If there is ever a problem with this I'll deal with it. As far as the website style and colors, I am sorry a lot of you don't like it. I purposely made it simple so that people could find what they were looking for easily. The site is not meant to show-off my skills with html. I might change a few things to brighten it up a bit, but I want it to remain easy to use. I am really interested in ideas for Google-related topics that I can post on the site - that people can benefit from. Please feel free to let me know here, or e-mail me (contact@googleadvisor.org) if you have any ideas. Thanks!
VW - made people take pictures that showed the VW symbol on the front of the bus off their websites and ads. Look at a VW mag and you will see the ads have no VW symbol showing. Strange stuff. I worked for a company that Mattttelll sued because of pictures of a toy they made being shown inside the item the company made. The funniest part was Mattttellll provided the cars. (Yes I mispelled their name on purpose because they are ruthless, just ask the people who were sued for showing barbbbie collections on the internet!)
I think it's a pretty good site....I suck at making websites myself... I think there is always room for improvement... but I like the idea....
I will add eBay to the list. They offerred to sue me unless I changed the domain name on one of my web sites. This caused me to lose all of the inbound links I had coming to that site.
Ahhh... but back on topic... I don't think the site is ugly, but I do think that the white on grey text in the footer is profoundly unnattractive. Your page filenames use underscores -- they should use dashes instead. mailto: links are spam attactors. You might want to change that to using a feedback form. Your article titles are in <font size="+1">, this isn't really good SEO practice. You should probably put those in <H1> tags.
I just wanted to mention that I have done a bit of an upgrade to the site. It is now running through b2evolution, to make adding new content a lot easier. It is also possible to add comments to any news or Google articles posted on the site. I appreciate all your feedback here, thanks.
Makes sense... Good site but you'd better change its name to searchengineadvisor or keywordadvisor or similar.
Don't you just love when people use what others are doing to justify their own actions! "There are tons of sites out there with Google in the domain name...so I'll be fine." :thumbsup:
Kinda ironic that a site about a search engine has bad SEO practices But seriously, your site looks not too bad, and really its the wealth of information that will make your site, not the look. Dread