Anyone have a domain that is miscategorized by content filtering/parental controls?

[CLKeenan]

Long story short, I bought a domain and it being classified as Adult/Pornography for some reason by a couple of the web content filtering/parent controls/netnanny services. The site would be accessed by students at school/libraries/etc. where that category of pages would be blocked = no good.

Couple questions:
1. Will these services ever rescan/update their database on their own? Or will I need to manually find out which services are blocking it and request them to change their categorization? Seeing as how the site has not had any adult content on it in quite some time (talking years here), I'm thinking it's all manual requests.
2. Anyone have a list of all of the major web content filtering services?
3. Anyone know of a way to bulk check?
4. Any other tips?

Thanks

 

[Hansel Han]

I'm thinking it's down to manual requests as well. Even google errs on the side of assuming the worst and making you manually appeal its categorization should it be too aggressive.

I own a forum that managed to get labeled as "adult content" by most filters back in 2009. I scrubbed the forum of anything that could be construed as "adult" and imposed etiquette guidelines upon my users, but I took no further action.

Most of my users are in the age group that would try to access the site from junior/highschool where it was wrongly banned for adult themes. In 2012, users began saying that they could access the site from school suddenly. I have nothing but hearsay anecdotes about some users manually appealing the categorization through whatever "Appeal URL" channel unique to the filter their school district, but I imagine that's what reversed the categorization.

Of course, my site was soon recategorized as "chat room/gaming" where it continues to be ubiquitously banned.

 

[CLKeenan]

Thanks for the info. As I plan to ultimately redirect my current site to the new URL, I might ask the users to try accessing the new URL from their school and appeal the filter in advance. Right now I'm 301'ing the new domain to the old domain for the time being. Sorry if that was confusing.

 

[greenleaves]

If you are 301'ing, any categorization should follow you.

Quite a number of years ago, I dealt with a forum which had this issue. We removed the offending content (it was a NSFW section that was extremely popular and ranking for all types of celeb names; which we didn't want since we were targeting high value customers and didn't want the noise from the NSFW section to hurt the main business) - We got rid of the NSFW section and enforced an anti-nude picture posting policy.

It eventually got re-classified, but it took time.

 

[erect]

Right now I'm 301'ing the new domain to the old domain for the time being. Sorry if that was confusing.

Technically speaking, that should be a 302 (temporary) redirect. Not sure how much difference it'll end up making as I've seen 301 (permanent) redirected domains reindexed ... possibly just a slightly slower process.