AV and banning

help please

[tigger]

Could anyone tell me please is there anyway to find out if AV has banned an URL as I've been submitting a site now for the last 3 mths and not getting anything in.

I did at first, within 2 weeks get some of my keywords in and not too badly ranked #6 and #7, but they have now vanished and I've been unable to get anything from that URL in since.

My only concern is the client did purchase some additional domains and placed re-directs to the main site, then submitted them also to the SE's which AV was one.

His claim was "he wanted to see if he could match my rankings with hopefully main URL, then the others". I have now told him to stop as the SE's would class that as spamming the site, but has the dammage been done ? and was I correct ?

And lastly, if AV has banned a site how do you get around this ? without having to buy a new domain and move the site

thanks

P.S good morning from the uk :)

[makemetop]

tigger

I did manage to get a page ban lifted at AV UK (I think) - but have not tried at AV US. It was for a similar situation where the client had done stuff without consulting us and then submitted themselves. The result was that both their domain was banned (and still is) and the 'gateway' URL was also dropped. I sent through to AV (from their support page) a note which said that we were the SEO people responsible for preparing relevent search engine content for our client but I thought they may have dropped the URLs because of X Y Z and that we had informed our client of these breaches of AV rules but this was only after we discovered what they had done. Apologized, said that both AV and ourselves have a common interest in providing searchers with relevent and informative answers to their search queries - wanting to work together to enhance the reputation of SEs etc. I had no reply but our 'gateway' URL has now reappeared and ranks in the top 5 for all the search terms for the client. That could be coincidence but I don't think so as the client's own main site is still not listed. Did not send any request to AV US (where both URLs are still not listed) because it was not so important to our client.

[tigger]

without meaning to sound to thick, how did you know the site was banned, other than not finding within the search.

[makemetop]

Reasonable question - I don't truly know but on AV US and UK the URL we submitted ranked highly for months but then disappeared within 2 weeks of the client submitting their own site. We also noticed significant downgrading of other URLs which were sites we had submitted for no apparent reason apart from having a link to our site(this was only on AV UK). There were no hiccups on AV US apart from our submitted URL being removed from their database and not showing up on resubmission. My major reason for contacting AV UK was because of the possible effect of being (maybe) blamed for the spamming by our client and the knock on effect it might have on other sites being submitted by us (I could, of course, just have been overly paranoid). However within 72 hours of my contacting AV all my sites were restored to their previous rankings (some improved significantly) and the URL we had submitted for our client had been restored without us having resubmitted it. So answer to your question? Because such a radical change happened to all our results overnight without there appearing to be a big change in the AV UK algo I thought the chances of being penalized were high - the client's web designers had spammed with LOTS of hidden text - and they are a big, multi-million £ company so, not an obscure site either! After we contacted AV all sites were restored - apart from the clients site (from which we have now removed all hidden text). Could it just be coincedence? Possibly, but I don't think so.

Bottom line is that our contacting AV certainly didn't appear to have done any harm and possibly being up front with them might have done some good. Anyway regardless of the reasons let me take this opportunity of saying that I think the people at AV UK are warm and wonderful human beings!!! ;)

[tigger]

thanks for the advice.

I would also like to point out just how friendly and warm I too find the staff at AV.uk, it must have taken them a long time to build such a wonderfull team. (and that's even before I've spoken to them :)

[sagerock]

I too ran into problems with a client who was banned from AV - all the way back when AV was telling us that "too many URL's had been submitted." We had just optimized the site when we first submitted so I knew we probably weren't originally at fault. The client had come to us from another SEO company.
Since then we focused on other engines. But since we weren't getting anything in AV, we recently refocused our efforts. I sent AV an email(I did this initially, way back when - but with no response) and this time did get a response. The client was banned for spam. I can post the email if you are interested.
I forwarded this to the client about a week ago and haven't heard anything. I don't know if possibly he is aware of something I don't know. But at least we are on our way to getting in.
I took any kind of response as a positive thing.
We'll see.

[Terry]

My site has a lot of WPG type doorways and after holding high positions on AV for many months suddenly the traffic dropped to zero from this SE. My site was nowhere to be found and despite several attempts at re-submitting remains "banned".

I read somewhere that by creating a simple test page with the follwing tag <META NAME="robots" CONTENT="noindex,nofollow"> you could then test to see if you are banned from AV. Upload the test page to both the suspect domain and a domain that is known to be good and submit both to AV.

I tried this - the "banned" domain simply returns the usual successful response indicating that the page has not actually been spidered and the good domain submission returns an error proving that the page has been spidered and the tag has been read.

I'm no HTML expert but it confirmed my suspicions that the site is banned (now busy working on a new site just for AV).

Hope this helps.

[tigger]

thanks terry I'll give that a try later, it's got to be better than sending an e-mail to AV, shame that won't work in AV.uk

[tigger]

Terry,

I have tried what you said with a number of my sites and some got the error message about the noindex tag and some didn't! So from what you have said then the ones that didn't get the error message are banned sites.

I then did a check for the domain name within the database and the site that is "banned" has three doorway pages listed. Now does this mean that if a site is banned any pages that were indexed stay there or if a site is banned do the pages get pulled from the database completely?

[Terry]

Tigger,

I can tell you what happened in my case:

Firstly most of my pages were dropped completely at the AV update that took place in June - like makemetop I noticed almost immediately the drop off in traffic and started to check the cause. Thats when I realised that I had a problem with AV.com. Not knowing why my pages had been dropped I then proceeded to resubmit all of the pages gradually over a number of days and waited, and waited, and waited....

After a few weeks I checked again and found that all my pages had now gone from AV. From this I assumed that the process of re-submitting had knocked out the ones that were still listed.

After reading through the various forums I discovered posts by a number of people warning that WPG doorways were the cause. I also have a free domain (Tripod) that I use for testing and a few weeks later any of those Tripod pages that linked to my main domain also disapeared from AV.

I can't be sure but your experience sounds very similar to mine and I guess you have been "banned".

I read various posts about people trying to get "un-banned" without much success.

My problem is that my doorway pages rank very well on Google and Excite (and, ironically AV.co.uk!) so I am reluctant to change them too much. My worry is that eventually more SE's will follow AV's lead and ban WPG type doorways, so I am trying o build a new site using the themes concept that Brett talks about on his excellent site.

[tigger]

I think by the sound of things your problem was due to the use of WPG's doorways. I think most people will agree it's like waving a red flag in front of a bull and stamping doorway page all over it.

I've for some time now been making my own doorways and running them through the page critic, which so far is working well and I have have quite a few number 1 spots on AV for my clients, except this one !!!

It's very annoying as this clients become a friend and it's s**'s law that 9 times out of 10 things never work out the way you plan it when doing thing's for friends

I've just checked this morning and he still has 1 doorway left, but it's so buried you need excavator to find it.

Maybe time to rebuild :(

[lizzie]

All my pages have suddenly gone down a LOT in hits
and it dosn't help to wait and resubmit them. Many have been
dropped. Do the SE's ban an IP address or do they ban
a domain? I have several domains and they all suddenly dropped
to 1 or 2 hits a day. I had submitted 2 sites a day each from a different domain for 3 days in a row when it started. What did
I do wrong? Thanks to anyone who offers an answer!

[JamesR]

lizzie,

the SEs can ban by both IP and domain, but you are probably just hitting a filter. check out this thread [webmasterworld.com] for more info.

[2_much]

James R,

What determines whether they ban the IP or the domain? Do they ban both?

I've been trying to find an answer to this question but have been unsuccessful...Any info. would be appreciated.

Thanks!

[Brett_Tabke]

A good seo friend had 10 sites banned by Alta. One was banned because the dummy was doing bait and switch style stuff by moving index pages ontop of high ranking subpages. All ten were banned. After the too many urls went away, he got the other 9 back in. I've heard similar stories.

I don't think alta is doing ip banning any more - straight domain name if/when it happens.

[2_much]

Thanks Brett!

[tigger]

Brett

what you would advise to be the best action to take with my problem (please see start) I've now sent 4 e-mails to av over the last 2 weeks with no responce, but their again I wasn't realy expecting one, but considering how polite/crawling/begging I was it would have been nice to get something other than the standard turn around letter offering a 2 day responce !!

the client has now purchased another domain and I've moved the site to new space so lets hope AV will be kind to me. the only problem being the banned domain is the clients trading name so he would still like to see that in the SE, any ideas ?

thanks for a great quarterly