Since there is a propensity for all free services on the internet to be abused by backlink spammers, scammers, domain-squatters, and people selling illicit goods and services, all new Bear sites go through a manual review process before they are displayed on the discovery feed or indexed by search engines.

To skip the review process and immediately make your blog publicly discoverable you can upgrade. This also supports the platform ʕ•ᴥ•ʔﾉ♡

New free blogs have the option to opt-in to a manual review. This is done (by yours truly) once a week to ensure only good quality content makes its way onto the platform.

Step one

Once a new site it created the site will be available only at its subdomain (or custom domain, if that has been set up) but will not be available in the discovery feed or linked to in any way. It will also include tags that prevent it from being crawled by search engines until it has been approved.

This is to prevent the bearblog.dev domain from being blacklisted by search engines as this would have a detrimental effect on all Bear sites. The site is completely useable during this time, but is only discoverable via the site being explicitly shared by the owner.

Step two

The site then enters a to-review stack which allows a moderator to go through all the new blogs and approve or block any new site. This step also allows the moderator to contact the site owner to help them out if it's apparent they are struggling. This process is covered in detail in this post

Step three

Sites are reviewed most days of the week, and the restrictions are removed if valid, or blocked. If a site is blocked there is an appeal process that will be displayed to the site owner (although this has yet to be used, spammers know who they are).

Step four

Your site is up and running and has a perfect SEO score, can be crawled by search engines, and will display on the Bear discovery feed. However, if it is reported as being prohibited content, it will be re-reviewed and blocked (if necessary) to protect the sanctity of the bearblog.dev domain for everyone else.