Creator here. I initially built this as a challenge to myself to make a better signup form. The purpose was to simplify email collection: placing a signup form in an article should be as easy as placing an image. Conversely, subscribing should be as easy as a swipe. I wanted something that looked cool, without being flashy, and also adaptable to different types of websites. This is what came out of it.
A couple of things that you might find pretty cool:
- Everyone gets a subscribe.to/brandname URL
- Works natively on Medium: just type https://subscribe.to/me and press Enter
I guess it depends on the primary purpose of the entity. It doesn't matter if Affligem (or any other business) was created by monks, atheists or space aliens. It's still a brewery. Of course, you could argue that all religious organizations are businesses, but for all intents and purposes we do not include them in these kinds of analyses, lest everything becomes a business and the analyses become meaningless.
I had the same thing happen to me with the same domain - twice. It just disappeared from Cloudflare without any notice. I run multiple domains on the same CF account, yet this has only happened with that specific one, which uses a somewhat unusual TLD (.do).
- First off, according to Ahrefs, their dofollow / nofollow ratio is a staggering 10:1, which is a huge red flag right away. A more natural ratio would be in the neighborhood of 1:2 so we are talking 20x less. But hey, maybe it's the niche that naturally attracts a ton of dofollow links - let's move on
- Looking at another of the main spam indicators, anchor text, most of them are just single keywords, like "ashwagandha", which point to the page optimized to rank for that exact generic search. The entire website is targeting single-term searches, which are notoriously hard to rank for and attract a lot of spam websites. This falls into anchor text over-optimization. They have 210 referring pages linking to their curcumin page with the exact anchor text "curcumin", same with "catechins", "creatine", "caffeine", "vitamin d" and the list goes on for all the keywords they are trying to rank for. This is not just unusual, it's literally impossible for it to just happen naturally. This has the Penguin penalty written all over it. Moving on...
- Their backlinks are for sure interesting. Among their top backlinks, we have pages such as:
https://www.herbalsupplementreview.com/retro-lean-forskolin/ - with a URL rating of 46 for a website with zero traffic. In SEO terms these are called “PBN links”. Not that unusual for the health niche, but definitely not white hat. Here’s another one with the same identical metrics as the previous one (this time, it’s a homepage link), also from a dubious website with zero traffic:
https://best-testosteronebooster.com/.
All of these with exact match anchor texts leading to their corresponding Examine.com pages.
- Mind you, I’m not saying that they don’t have great editorial content, and I’m not sure who helped them with their SEO, but I’m not the least bit surprised that Google might have penalized them multiple times for several reasons. There's probably more stuff but this is what I was able to find with a quick analysis.