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Here is what I did:
I used to have interlinked domains, with much crosslinking.
I had them for over 3 years (I came up with the idea before Google was even born). I have always tried to stay away from the SEO dark side, i.e. I did what the SEs wanted. So in the last year, when Google started penalizing my sites (PR 0's and then recently getting dropped from the database), I got off my lazy rear and started removing the crosslinking.
These sites are not spam at all. Each group consists of about 6 sites in the same field, but each site is about a different colour of widget. The sites are very information heavy, and with original and fresh content.
I recently sent in a reinclusion request, following the instructions from GoogleGuy at [webmasterworld.com...]
I told then what I had been doing, and what I did to remedy the situation (removing the crosslinks), included a list of all my sites, and asked them to look into the penalties I have. I included my WebmasterWorld name, and GoogleGuys.
I got an autoresponse saying to visit [google.com...]
NO KIDDING! Where do you think I got the info to revamp the sites in the first place!
Has anyone else gotten such a miserable response from the Google reinclusion requests?
Does anyone have any advice about what I should do next? Or should I just scrap the whole list of sites?
One very dissapointed Dude :(
Trouble is, I truly believe, even if Google were to say "Oh God, why the hell did we ban this site?!" and lifted the ban. If it were the White House's official site that got banned and then released. It would still, thereafter, never make anything better than page 4 for search returns for "White House". And that Mr. Bush would therefore be better off buying a new domain ;-)
Again, if you have a permanent redirect in your .htacess file, it is my understanding that Google will never be able to see your robots.txt file on your trashed domain / site.
If you put permanent / to newdomain.com, any robots.txt request will go to the new domain too. Sure, if you put permanent /index.html to newdomain.com/index.html this would work for any calls to your main index.html page. But most calls from search engines / directories will be for the root domain right? So it is pointless as far as I can see.
Also, again, if Google were to carry penalties with redirects from penalized sites. It would be a simple matter to build a one page hate site, submit it to 200 guest books, get Google to ban it, and then shove a redirect to your competitor. I still do not see how Google would carry a penalty across anyway.
Did you just have your sites poiniing to each other in the footer. That is not a penalty. Never has been. There are too many sites that have not been penalized for that.And there are many that have. Me included. Is there a "safe" limit? 5 links? 10 links on each index page of every site? Risk it by all means.. some get away with it for months, years or just days...
I agree. Some site got penalized with only 2 links, others are still around with half a dozen. There really doesn't seem to be a standard, or at least it is not regularly implemented.
One thing seems for sure, they all get bit in the end.
>And there are many that have.
There may be many that think they have: but I bet there is nobody on earth that has been told by anyone in a position to know, that that is the case. It's only speculation.
The common scenario, which nearly all these "penalty-whinging" sites fit, is:
1) Webmaster, in the process of artificially inflating page rank, does some things that Google penalizes, and some other things that Google is not yet smart enough to ignore. Page Rank is inflated.
2) User complains about quality of search results. Google looks at abusing site and removes it manually.
3) Google also tweaks algorithm so as to ignore certain artificial link patterns.
4) User notices Google ban, and goes back into site, removing abusive patterns they notice and think Google will notice.
5) Site returns to Google index, with lower page rank. User complains loudly about "penalty".
But is that rational? Absolutely not!
There are at least these identifiable factors involved:
1) The actual Google-violations, which caused the site to be removed, but formerly contributed to the inflated page rank. Those contributions are gone, forever, regardless. Pagerank will inevitably be lower as a result.
2) The abusive links the user removed, not realizing that Google hadn't noticed them...whatever contribution they had made to pagerank is lost.
3) The abusive links the user didn't remove, not realizing that they were what enabled Google to tie that site into a particular bad neighborhood...
4) The non-abusive links the user DID remove out of a paranoiac impulse, not realizing they were all that kept the site from being included in a very bad neighborhood formerly.
5) The Google algorithm might have, in the meantime, gotten better at recognizing and discounting incestuous mutual-admiration-societal links, so that some non-banned but still artificial links might not create as high a pagerank as formerly they did.
6) Other sites might have been gaining links [and this is often completely invisible for low-pagerank pages], so that the same page-rank resulted in a lower placement.
Of course, we cannot absolutely eliminate the possibility that Sergey spends 24 hours a day singling out small affiliate retail sites to visit with personal, hand-selected numeric penalties to pagerank, or that his black helicopter is hovering outside your office window at this very minute. But there's nothing here that couldn't have been caused by far more probable factors.
Trouble is, I truly believe, even if Google ...lifted the ban...It would still, thereafter, never make anything better than page 4 for search returns...
This is unfortunate, if true - We have a site that very nearly validates but for a few errors that I should go in and fix. I use a css - hide/display trick to add some meaning to the elements of the navigation menu (as taught by Eric Meyer on his website, no less - not that he cares about Google..)
I uploaded the site and waited and waited through the Google growing pains of the last few months - nothing. Yet #1 in other engines for it's terms. So I sent in a reinclusion request.....
About a week later the site shows up, only the home page of about 30. It shows up at Number 1 for it's key terms... Now, I should be happy, right?
Why I'm not:
1 - We've seen but only one visit from Googlebot since the request.
2 - Although Google has yet to get back to me *cough*, if this site was banned for this, lets get out and start another search engine cause there's simpler stuff than this still out there.
3 - None of the other pages have shown up yet.
Now, I know I need to wait it out (it hasn't been that long), but unfortunately right now it seems that the quote above is true.
I'll say it again... the only way to get a penalty removed and have a real human look into your case is to fly out to the googleplex, and sleep outside like a homeless bumb with a few signs begging to be re-included right next to the main lobby door.
Sooner or later the smell will begin to bother them and they will just put you back in if it is spam-free :)I know I would do it if I was ever kicked out :)
(Hmm... I wonder if this sort of effort would work for simply increasing one's ranking. Hmm... :glancing at sleeping bag:)
