Forum Moderators: open
For the past two years, ever since I started AdWords, Google has dropped my site in November - just before the Holiday Season.
Since I am an online retailer, this has cost me tens of thousands of dollars. This year, we were never re-listed after the Holidays. This is now costing me tens of thousands a month in lost sales. I have emailed consistently with nothing but a canned response back. I paid thousands for a "professional SEO company" without any remedy.
What can I do?
Does anyone else think that Google is being irresponsible by not allowing us a voice? We support them directly and indirectly but we are treated like crap.
I would gladly pay a fee to have them look at my site and let me know what is wrong. But, they allow no resolution other than "read the webmaster page".
My team has read all the pages, followed forums and joined newsletters. We have taken down link directories for industry specific companies because "Google doesn't like link directories. We have added content to every product page. We have expended many hours and a lot of dollars to appease the Google gods with no luck.
I am not posting about a new site. We have been online since 1998, we've been on CNN, MSNBC, and in many major publications. We sell millions a year online. We even won the top 50 online retailers by a prestigious magazine. We are a great resource for anyone looking for our product. Our website is all about our product and we have no SEO tricks.
Does anyone know what we can do to get re-listed in Google?
[webmasterworld.com...]
If you don't have any 'SEO Tricks' on your site, the problem could very well be that you don't have any 'SEO Tricks' ;)
You may have a point here. To T_Bill: is your site *totally* out of Google, as in the pages not indexed, or is it that your site is just buried in the SERPs? Enter:
site:www.yoursite.com -jdashdjaskdkuadkjsa
into Google? Do any pages show with that?
We've been out of Google since Last November. In fact, we were dropped first in November 2002 but then reappeared in January 2003. This year when we dropped in November again I assumed that Google wanted beefed up AdWords spending for another holiday season but then this year we were never relisted.
I paid thousands to an SEO company to help but they got our rankings reduced in other search engines so we dropped them.
Eventually, laws will have to be brought in if the search engines don't sort this out themselves first.
Kaled.
PS There is a browser that can be configured to show any User Agent but I can't remember which one. You might try setting the User Agent to 'Googlebot ...' and make sure your site works ok. Perhaps somone else can help with the name of the browser. (However, bear in mind, IP addresses can be blocked too.)
I believe that they owe it to us to create a reinclusion service. They could charge for the service to keep the riff raff out.
When they ban a site, they have a reason. If they would pass it on to us I would act. But instead, I'm in the dark.
Plus, I don't believe we should have to design our site for search engines. Value to our visitors should be the sole motivation and directive.
Not only that, we have a big inventory of quality products with great customer service. We are an excellent resource for anyone looking for our products.
We deserve to be reincluded. If I could get a straight answer from Google on what they want changed we'd do it. We already took industry link directories down because Google "may" not like them. I must admit, I'm angry that I have to design my site for Google above our customers.
maybe there's no need to throw away the domain name, especially if it ranks well in other search engines.
1. Follow rfgdxm1's advice and find out why you were banned. Check robots.txt, check for doorway pages, guestbook spamming, research if your host might have banned googlebot, etc. A search on google for
"site:www.webmasterworld.com why banned google"
or similar should yield many interesting threads.
2. If no obvious causes are found:
3. Point a new domain name at your hosting account.
4. Create a dynamic robots.txt. If olddomain.com/robots.txt is called, it should disallow googlebot in all directories. If newdomain/robots.txt is called, it should disallow all major bots EXCEPT googlebot. You might need someone with programming knowledge to do this. Then make sure a few clean PR5+ links point to the new domain.
That's a drastic measure and last resort but at least not quite as final as throwing away the old domain.
At least you could be pretty sure that you'll be in Google by the holiday season, and you will keep your Yahoo rankings.
Eventually (after a year) you could try a "test balloon", allow one directory of olddomain in Google, and 301 some pages from "newdomain" to "olddomain." See if they get listed in Google (with olddomain.com/...). If yes, it might be safe to 301 the whole "newdomain" site back to "olddomain".
Again: this is a drastic measure. It would be preferable to find out what caused your site to drop out of Google, fix it, then send a re-inclusion request. But, with the latter approach, there is a lot of uncertainty and you depend on a Google employee manually flipping a switch so to speak.
Depending on your hosting account and your site's source code, someone could set up the solution I described within a couple hours. It could be rolled back anytime to how it was, too.
Disclaimer: the above is just what I would do if I was shooting for my best chance to be in Google within a few months, I'm not the foremost Google expert on this forum though :-)
It's in Google interest to list your site. So, if you fix whatever caused you to drop out of the index, you should be able to get back in with your old domain.
If you dropped after an "SEO firm" had a go at your site, and google are sending you a stock response based on guidelines, then my gut instinct says it should be pretty obvious what the problem is if you look at the source of the pages carefully.
TJ
We had the same experience in November of 2002 but we were reincluded in January. But, after this 2003 holiday season we were never reincluded.
We've been looking in to this for months. When our efforts failed we hired the seo firm and now, after months, I feel their efforts have failed too.
We had the same experience in November of 2002 but we were reincluded in January.
OK, what exactly happened between November and Jan 03?
I do not believe this is related to seasonal activity or AdWords.
TJ
I recommend that you keep your site on the current domain, just because thats the URL a lot of people have bookmarked. But it will take some time to get it back in Google, so get one or more new domains and make some microsites for your most important areas (i.e. t-shirtking-music.com, t-shirtking-funny.com etc - do not use subdomains in this case). Put them on different web hosts, with different IP-domain, and do not link too heavily to them from your current site and vice versa - a single link on the homepage for each microsite will do. Also, you can link from the homepage of each microsite to the other microsites.
Now, don't "optimize" these new microsites the same way that your current website, which is quite "spammy" from Googles point of view. Just rely on the copy. Get some quality links for each microsites from others, if possible.
Regarding your current site, I would start by removing the meta keyword tag from all pages. Then I would make sure that the word t-shirt was only used once in the title tags, and not on every page. Finally, try not to repeat the word t-shirt more than max. 3-5 times on each page... the copy gives me a headache :-) (see for instance ww*.t-shirtking.com/products_t-shirts/Plus_Size_T-Shirts.html). Also, I'm not sure what Google thinks about your "Search categories here" with the band names on every page...
Good luck.
I paid thousands to a top seo firm who also didn't find the problem.
Did they point you at google's technical guidelines bullet point #2 relating to Session ID's?
[google.com...]
TJ
I actually think that the seo firm was a mistake and hurt more than helped.
As far as the session id's, we have a mozilla redirect so search engine bots will not see them. Could this also be a problem?
After months of other research, this is some of the best advice I found. Thanks.
Nope. I'm familiar with the specifics here. Even the home page with no session ID is toolbar gray. Even if the session ID prevented Googlebot crawling, root should be in the index.
Could this also be a problem?
Hard to say for sure. I don't think google minds cloaking where the *sole* purpose is to stop serving googlebot SID's.
It's one potential source to examine very closely, put it that way.
Nope. I'm familiar with the specifics here. Even the home page with no session ID is toolbar gray. Even if the session ID prevented Googlebot crawling, root should be in the index.
There are two possibilities - not just the SID's but the cloaking aspect. What else is being shown or not being shown in the cloaked pages?
Could Google possibly have implemented the penalty simply on a domain-wide basis thereby excluding root along with all the rest?
In the interest of the WW TOS shouldn't we lose the references to the site above before a mod comes in and does it?
If anyone really wants to find it, they know where to look.
TJ
Even if the session ID prevented Googlebot crawling, root should be in the index.
Unless the algo or a hand check revealed that the site had tons of pages indexed, many with same content, but a different URL - thus the ultimate penalty.
There are already many copies of your store, and many pages of those are in Google with automatic redirects etc. Search "For more information about these t-shirts, click on the t-shirt images"
Some with numbers in the domain, various abbreviations of the keywords in the domain, etc.
You really have a clusterf..., err, clusterdomain problem. Not just a problem with one single domain.
My recommendation: Take down the various secondary domains before doing anything else.
