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Comment by gus_massa | Hacker News Reader

> We are the national governing body for a sport.

Link?

I hesitated to include it: didn't want HN to mess with our analytics and free hosting limits (or our review at the mercy of Google). What the hell, here it is: https://www.chess.ca/

We used to have Matt Cutts [1] here, and he used to take a look at somewhat similar problem. I just guess that if someone is going to give e hand, s/he needs the link to take an unofficial look.

There is still a link to the old site in https://www.chess.ca/en/ws/under-construction/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Cutts

The /en/ws/under-construction link is to http://www.chess.ca/en/ws/old-chess-ca/ which is a page on the new website that explains the dangers before you click a button to actually go to the old site. The link on the explanation page is what I removed.

> which is a page on the new website that explains the dangers before you click a button to actually go to the old site.

So the new site still intentionally (contrary to your prior claim that all links were removed and that you verified this in your source) links to the old site, and you don't understand why the appeal of the badware listing due to that link failed?

> The link on the explanation page is what I removed

I still see the link in the link in the English version https://imgur.com/a/GqrwNkc Perhaps you fixed the French version?

In your imgur, you see "LINK" will take you to "chess.ca/en/ws/old-chess-ca/". You've nicely pointed this out with red arrows. "/en/ws/old-chess-ca/" is NOT the old website. It is a page on the new website. It has an explanation of the situation. Previously, this explanation page had the link to the old website (at http://old.chess.ca/), but I removed that (English and French) this morning before requesting a review by Google. Even though these links are now gone, they failed my review.

I thought it was weird to put the old site as a subdirectory of the new one, but I think it is possible with some trick in Apache or whatever you are using. It make more sense to use another subdomain, and as yuo noted in the sibling comment it may be what is causing the problem. I really don't know. Good luck.

(How much info is in the old server? Is it possible to put the old server behind a proxy that rewrite all the pages and remove the malware or whatever is the problem? Perhaps remove all the links to external sites and to executable files or something like that. I'm 80% sure this is a bad idea, but perhaps it is possible with enough technical knowledge.)

Many ways to do it, but another subdomain was easiest. The two websites are on different hosts.

There is still a lot of info on the old website. When we decided to go with an "emergency" rewrite of our website, instead of trying to cleanse Drupal, we rewrote only the core functions needed to run tournaments. To keep users from complaining, I kept old.chess.ca available. Now, they'll just have to wait. I do not want to risk anything that might provoke the Google monster into banishing the new website again.

Ya got me thinking. Maybe they failed my review because they expected both www.chess.ca and old.chess.ca to be entirely cleaned-up (both being *.chess.ca). I'm so desperate to get unblocked that I have deleted the DNS entry for old.chess.ca (TTL=15m so I hope it is gone before Google re-reviews me). FYI, since eventually you won't be able to go to old.chess.ca either.

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