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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?
We've been online for six years and have acculated tons of links. Note that the search brought up 23,600 pages.
Note that the search brought up 23,600 pages.
And some of them, on wholly seperate domains, redirect to yours.
I think you have a lot of work to do to clean this one up, but it's feasible - no need to go creating another domain.
What you need to do should be fairly obvious now?
TJ
We have multiple spelling variations of our domain all pointing to the main domain. It was done in a way that was recommended by the seo firm. This is not as a trick, it is simply practical. Our domain can be spelled in different ways and it is easily misspelled. An example is CNN chose a domain name spelling that is not our main domain. The traffic was directed to the main domain anyway. We can't lose those domains.
After we implemented the redirect, all other search engines began only pointing to our main domain. This makes me think it is a good thing.
BTW - thanks for all of the help. This is what I've needed all along.
It was done in a way that was recommended by the seo firm.
Ignore what the "SEO firm" told you and listen to what google is telling you. In my opinion they are doing you no dis-service whatsoever in pointing you to their webmaster guidelines.
From memory one of the domains was a thingsontwowheelswhizzbang.com type name (I'm sure you'll know the one).
TJ
How can we control sites that use redirects?
If they're not yours, nothing. But I still think you have plenty to do.
The interlinking of all your sub-domains is also something I would get rid of.
But most importantly - check what it is exactly that you're serving googlebot via the cloaking. For my money, this is still the strongest potential candidate for the penalty, especially given everything you've said about the "SEO firm" you used.
TJ
[edited by: trillianjedi at 3:56 pm (utc) on June 7, 2004]
You should make sure to host all those different spellings yourself.
Cut off associates that build sites with meta-refresh redirects or who just copy your site's content. Closing the faucet of revenue should shut down these sites down pretty quickly.
Try to get your money back from your SEO.
***
A general observation. Not directed at T_Bill, just something that occurred to me.
Google is often getting a bad rap on this forum.
You read all those messages from webmasters upset about being banned and not ranking well. You think that these are all very clean, nicely designed, unique sites with original content offering valuable products and services. Sites like, well, yours and mine ;-) ;-)
Then you happen to find out what these sites really are, and sometimes it makes you think.
I wish more webmasters would ask themselves: If everyone did what I did, and had 100% success in getting all pages ranked, would the Google index be better or worse?
If you build sites that fill Google with 10,000's of pages of duplicate content, or allow it to happen through actions of SEOs, associates, etc., then I don't think it's adviseable to come here and complain about Google. Look first if anything related to your site is ranking in Google and if it looks or feels spammy, clean it up first. Tell us the whole story. "I was dropped out of Google" is not correct if 1000's of pages of your content can be found on Google.
Also, "Everyone's doing it" or "Our SEO recommended to set it up that way" does not count as an excuse. If you can find the webmasterworld address, you can find out enough within an hour or two to know what's wrong.
I hope I didn't come across as too harsh. I guess I'm just a bit grumpy. Monday morning what can I say?
:-)
We do need to clean up the affiliate sites and that is in our power. The rest of the sites that link to us or use our content is a bigger problem I'm not sure we'd ever get a handle on.
We'll also look in to the redirect and forget everything the seo firm told us.
I must say though, I still think that Google should have a reinclusion service. We should be able to design our sites for the customer and not Google. If some practices are considered bad by Google but we think that they are necessary or beneficial, we should have some recourse to argue our claim.
If some practices are considered bad by Google but we think that they are necessary or beneficial, we should have some recourse to argue our claim.
I think google are absolutely crystal clear on their terms of service, and why shouldn't they have one? And why should they vary that on a case by case basis?
If you think about it, the practical implications of doing that are impossible. 10's of millions of webmasters all asking for special treatment?
All webmasters are in the same boat - there are no unfair advantages.
You can have as many 301 re-directs as you like pointing to your main domain. The problem is, yours don't look like 301's to me. I have no idea what they are. I could be wrong.
If other people are using your content, then report them to google for the copyright infringement:-
[google.com...]
TJ
But most importantly - check what it is exactly that you're serving googlebot via the cloaking. For my money, this is still the strongest potential candidate for the penalty, especially given everything you've said about the "SEO firm" you used.
TJ
They should charge for the service and they should profit from it. And, they have every right not to. I'm just saying that it should be included as a customer service benefit.
As for the redirects, we'll be looking at them.
And, please, be harsh and be critical to make your point. It's a great education.
I must say though, I still think that Google should have a reinclusion service.
While they don't (to my knowledge) have a formal "click here to submit your site for re-inclusion after being penalized" form, I've read countless stories in this Forum from webmasters and business owners (like yourself) who cleaned up their site(s) and were eventually re-indexed. It can happen, and does.
We should be able to design our sites for the customer and not Google. If some practices are considered bad by Google but we think that they are necessary or beneficial,
Google would like you to design your site(s) for your users, and they say so specifically in the webmaster guidelines. There's nothing wrong with having multiple domains to account for misspellings -- that's user-friendly so long as each extra domain redirects via 301 (do a search, as suggested earlier) to the main domain. If you have multiple domains and are using some other method of addressing the redirect issue, Google is likely to view it as an attempt to spam their index, and you'll pay the price.
You've received some great advice and direction in this thread -- best of luck implementing it. You can get back where you want to be.
I'm not suggesting that Google do it for free but I do believe that there needs to be some recourse. My request is not for every site but for sites that get banned and want to have that recourse. Obviously there is a need.
Actually, I think this could be another good revenue stream for google.
Consider this....Google could launch a paid "compliance inspection" service...which (for a fee) would provide a inspection of your website for any possible violations, and give you a report of what you need to fix (on site, at least).
In fact, this could even be a great way for Google to "self-finance" a manual spam-fighting team. I would gladly pay a fee (within reason) to have an actual human take a hard-look at some of the doorway-spam affiliate sites in my genre. They could kill two birds with one stone....better PR from webmasters thru better communication, and a financially viable way to have human editor's stomp out reported spam!
....which (for a fee) would provide a inspection of your website for any possible violations, and give you a report of what you need to fix (on site, at least).
That would be a fantastic way for the black hats to work out exactly what you can get away with, and what you can't.
TJ
If Google took on 10 people or 1000 people to deal with this it would mean another 10 people or 1000 people who would need to be given at least some inside knowledge about the algo, etc. Upset just one of them and think of the damage that he or she could do by spilling the beans?
Getting back on topic for T-Bill. I went through a similar episode this year. After suffering badly from Florida my site was completely dropped on 30 January. I discovered that the likely cause was a link swapping scheme in which I participated. This consisted of only ten similar companies providing links to each other. I found out that Google considered one of them to be a bad neighbourhood and linking to them cost me my traffic!
I started emailing Google with questions and reinclusion requests and got mostly standard replies, but I persisted. During this period I also ensured that my site was squeaky clean, improved it and added new content. The good news was that at the beginning of April the site started to get fully indexed again and my PR5 returned on the home page. After about three or four more weeks the PR spread down the other pages and I started to get some traffic. On May 8th I suddenly appeared back at the top of the rankings for my main keyword and during the most recent PR update my site was elevated to PR6.
I am not being smug here and I am preparing for the worst while enjoying my current traffic. Who know what is around the corner but at least this proves that you can get back. During the time I was down I spent many days and weeks working on my site. I think this was why I got the boost when it returned.
Incidentally I don't know who your SEO people were but I can't find an H1 tag on your home page. This is surely a basic requirement?
Is Googlebot crawling your site? What do the logs say?
What did you do to get delisted? I need to know everything you could have possibly done - including rank checkers, non-toolbar pr checkers, buying PR, submission to FFA link directories, etc.
BTW - Get your URL out of your profile.
Can you be more specific? Without naming names, what exactly are they doing?
However, we have over 100,000 double opt in subscribers that came from our site. Occaisionally (once every three months) we get a complaint from them. To combat this, we stopped html newsletters and are putting our efforts in to a blog.
Definately no link farms. The other two - slim chance someone tried one but never on a regular basis or I would know.
0. Get rid of t-shirt.cgi.
1. Your session ID cloaking has nothing to do with this (primarily because it doesn't really work).
2. Know those misspellings of your domain that you have? You need to make them a 301 redirect. Nothing else. They MUST be 301s.
3. If you can get that page that's out there to remove that damned link to the Inktomi PFI SERP pointing to your site, do it. It shouldn't be hard to find.
4. You need to write Google a message. I'm definitely not the biggest advocate of this, but in this case it is necessary.
To: webmaster@google.com
Subject: Reinclusion Request
Dear Google,It has come to my attention that we have been removed from your search index.
I have researched the possible reasons for this, and believe it is due to the following terms of service violations that we have committed:
Unsolicited bulk email / spamming of web forums Spamming of search engine result pages through dynamic keyword page generation Use of unathorized automated query products such as rank checkers or non-toolbar PR checkers Affiliate program spam We are taking steps to resolve the above three issues. We have instituted a company-wide policy prohibiting any of the above three activities. We have notified our affiliates of the problems above, and they are also taking steps to resolve them.
Furthermore, we are taking technical measures to prevent any further automated querying of your services without your express permission.
We also believe that there is a potential redirect bug on your side that could be contributing to the issue. If this is the case, please inform us so we might be able to contact the offending webmasters of the pages in question and have them take the links down.
We request that you reinclude our site to the main search index, and resume normal spidering of our site. If there is anything we can do to assist in this process, please let us know.
Respectfully,
Mr. Company Prez, CEO And President
Company
Email: companyprez@company.com
Phone: (***) ***-****
A phone number proves that you are real.
This could take up to three months to happen. In the meantime, I suggest you start working on a web site redesign to launch in case 4-5 months go by with no progress on this.
BTW - here ia a message from our programmer:
"From the programmer: The only treatment I do to spiders is the following. In my link creation code, I echo the session id to each link on the site. The function that echoes the id only echoes it IF the user-agent has the word 'Mozilla' in it. We do not do any other redirects on our servers whatsoever. (and this method isn't even a redirect)"
Do you *seriously* mean this? I have a cell phone with a prepaid plan (I use it little.) Just today I was at my cellphone provider to pay them $50 to re-up my account for a full year. Whille I re-upped it I talked to the salesman. He told me about a mother who came in to re-up her *three year-old son's* cellphone. Which means my cellphone number is as valid as a 3 year old kid's. WHAT country do you live in that a cell phone number proves you are "real"? I live in the US. If I go down to the hood where all the poor folks live, I couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting someone with a cellphone.
