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I'm brand new here. I realize I could have posted this elsewhere, but I see the “brainpower” and “experience” here that I need for the answers to my questions.
BACKGROUND:
1. I am not a super serious SEO or spammer. I don’t know how, nor have I ever tried cloaking.
2. I did use “hidden text” (mainly because my homepage was graphic intensive—including fonts) I used about four sentences worth of hidden “keyword-rich” text.
3. I did create special pages (I guess doorway pages) crammed with keywords (it still made sense to someone reading it) with links back to my homepage. I had invisible links on my homepage linking to these doorway pages.
4. I have about 400 back links to my site. 80% to homepage, 20% to inner-pages
5. About 40% of my links are from guestbooks that are 100% relevant to my site (I did it mainly to attract visitors, rather than for PageRank.)
6. I had excellent (top 3 ranking) rankings – please note my keywords were not very competitive – so I was pretty lucky.
Okay that’s pretty much the sum of it – oh yeah, I have tons of excellent content on my site.
Mid April, I noticed my PageRank had slipped. A few days later – a GREY BAR!
I wrote Google, and they wrote back with the following:
<snip>
I 100% cleaned up my site (I still have keyword rich “special pages” but they now have real content and real value to visitors. I also included visible links to these pages on my homepage.
I wrote back to Google, fell on my knees and begged for forgiveness. This was their reply.
<snip>
MY QUESTIONS:
1. Has anyone had this experience?
2. Did you get re-listed?
3. How long did it take?
4. Do you think my “special pages” will present a problem?
5. If I email them again will they be vindictive and ban me forever? (I ask this question because I have read that you have to walk on eggshells when talking with Yahoo!, ODP, etc if you want results – otherwise they’d ignore you.)
6. Would it make sense to get another domain name, load HALF my content to the new domain and resubmit to Google? (The other half of my content would link back to my old (current) domain.)
7. Any suggestions to get back quickly?
I realize this a long post. To all who read and answer, thank very much!
[edited by: Marcia at 3:41 am (utc) on May 8, 2003]
[edit reason] No email quotes, please. [/edit]
No doubt there are many webmasters who are reading your post and jumping for joy.
But I'm not one of them.
Welcome to webmasterworld. I have never had any of my sites banned, but you can do a site search for "banned" or "my web site banned" and read a lot of threads by a lot of people who were in the same boat as yourself. Hopefully one of them will be generous enough to share his/her experience with you.
There has been talk that a culling was coming and that a lot of people were going to have to set their sites straight. There was also talk that once you cleaned up your act they will re-include it.
[edited by: Marcia at 3:41 am (utc) on May 8, 2003]
As such if all offending areas are removed... Google will let your site back in > in as short as 30 days.
The warning is clear though, if caught a second time > the time to be re-indexed again is twice as long... the third time, add another month.
