This is moronic. The pages are "autogenerated" because it's a web app. They have affiliate links because that MAKES TOTAL SENSE given the nature of the app ("show me as many products as possible that cost $X").
The difference is Google uses robots.txt to exclude these autogenerated pages from search engine crawlers. filleritem.com didn't; now they do[1]. Quite simple really.
No one should be banned from Google for failing to fill out robots.txt in the manner Google prefers. This is a horrible abuse of power -- and a competitor -- by Google. "Quite simple really."
I disagree; Google should have strong rules to filter out crap and give me great search results.
In this case we have something of an edge case; the site is useful, but the auto-generated pages cause potential problems for search results.
If you were talking about how Google communicates these issues, or how it goes about resolving these edge cases, then I'd be agreeing. Much to be improved.
But getting rid of the potential issue.. thumbs up.
Of course it should. But a rule that says you're banned because you're too open with search engines is insane. robots.txt should have nothing to do with it.
"We do need a competitor"
I think that's the core issue here. I run a portfolio of sites, did a series of experiments on Google's quality guidelines. Frustratingly, they are nowhere closer to finding the quality content as humans do, but they think they know it and implementing it.
My experimental sites(the contents that I made sure they are crappy in the eyes of humans) with cheap content ($3/100 words) without any editorial control marked as quality sites and perform well in searches. While the sites that we spent thousands of dollars with strict editorial control were punished for some reason.
At one point a scrapper site that picks up one of our sites partial feed with 150 words excerpt out ranked us in the search results. What kind of quality guideline is that, a 750 words post is bad quality while a 150 words excerpt of that is good.
Google's motive may be good, observing it for the past 7 months, I found their approach is wrong.
As you do I use BIng/DuckDuckGO these days. Google has so much market share (around 85% in my observation ), if it goes down to 30% then we don't need to worry about pleasing Google, but focus on pleasing our customers/visitors like normal business do.
I first heard about duckduckgo just last week. So far I really like it. Non-techie wife switched over to it, mainly due to sheer frustration with typical Google search results...
You know who else generates infinite autogenerated pages with affiliate codes attached? GOOGLE. http://www.google.com/search?q=teen+sex&tbm=shop&hl=...
It's scary that Google uses "logic" like yours to make these decisions. No: It's terrifying.