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We have a site that has vanished.... no pages via site:domain
and no googlebot for a month. The site has links in and been around for two years.
Google has responded with a standard email saying we may have been banned for actions such as cloaking, writing text in such a way that it can be seen by search engines but not by users, or setting up pages/links with the sole purpose of fooling search engines.
So, possible reasons:
1) We have ssi ads that kick in. This means our content changes but the page file date remains the same. Could this have been misinterpreted as cloaking?
2) A strange site has created about 40 pages of search results, all listed at google, with 20 links per page pointing at our site.
Any thoughts?
I'm having the same problem, I was in the results for several months until May 12. Someone suggested moving to another host, just in case google banned the IP hosting the site for some reason. I haven't tried it yet.
Google won't ban you for having incoming links, since you don't control them. Otherwise competitors would sabotage each others sites to take them out of the SERPs.
1) We have ssi ads that kick in. This means our content changes but the page file date remains the same. Could this have been misinterpreted as cloaking?
All my personal sites use SSI, some pulling in script produced random text and ads - no problems seen so far
2) A strange site has created about 40 pages of search results, all listed at google, with 20 links per page pointing at our site.
[edited by: 4eyes at 2:39 am (utc) on June 16, 2004]
Any coincidental chance that they use the same host?
Either way, could they be mistakenly viewed as doorway spam to your site?
This 'strange site' is based in the UK, is an 'everything' directory and has spidered a few of our sites. It then produces pages like:
www.............co.uk/cgi-bin/search.cgi?GroupBySite=yes&np=0&q=mobile%20phones&site=16581
with results listing our site pages mentioning 'mobile phones' with a snippet. Then they do another phrase.
Google has these pages.
I note they have done this to other sites, but they seem ok..... for now.
"Any coincidental chance that they use the same host?"
Now that is an interesting point. We use two different hosting companies.
The banned site is on one, but the other hosting company we use is shared with this 'strange' site. There may be a few cross links between our own sites on the two different servers, but not many, 2 or 3 deep links at the most. However, the 'community' between the two servers may have been established.
I would be amazed if google has assumed we created this 'strange' site, but I can see they may have spotted recipricol links at a server level, and assumed therefore foul play.
This is a worry, because it is a time bomb for our other sites. If google is seeing heavy interlinking between two servers, they may start to drop other sites on those servers.
Can you write and demand that they take the links off?
I'm beginning to think the two seperate ip's are now 'associated together' by google because of the heavy interlinking. However, I may be clutching at straws!
These are the thoughts I am having:
1) My site hit the google radar big time went it jumped well into alexa top 100,000.
2) 'Strange site' links heavily to it from a server which I use also for other sites. The two ip's thus become linked in several ways. My problem with this theory is that it must happen a lot all over the place.
3) I was 'human reviewed'. My site, although not spammy, is a ppc directory which may not be very popular with google!
I will change ip, but has the domain been banned forever?
Your ban site is like the website that is in your profile?, my sites are like this ppc directory but with adsense
My possible reason is that google is banning this type of sites to improve the quality of the SERP
Any thoughts about if is right link or redirect to another websites from a banned site?
It is really interesting to think that a competitor could set up a site using the same web host, and ideally (for them) on the same shared server, linking extensively to your site in order to cause a penalty. This would be especially successful if the competitor convinces you to exchange links.
But probably most important is getting out of that hosting environment. Then, chances are you'll pop back in a month or less. Worst case, three months. Of course, no one knows for sure.
Thanks for the advice, I shall change ip and see what happens.
Could you please sticky me when you resolve your issue?
I am very interested in this topic.
BTS111
Two, the big one and the homepage shared a large number of links (perhaps 150 links, each page the same, in a navbar on every page including between sites). One, the smaller newer one had a few links to the big site on its navbar.
The smaller site seems to have been entirely untouched. The big site and and the homepage are both nuked: no SERPs and most pages "partially indexed".
Since this happened in early June, we removed all the cross-links and shortened the navbars. GoogleBot has crawled every page since, but indexing is proceding at a page or two a day. So far PR-meter still showing PR8 after 3 weeks.
So the cross-linking, or use of shared IPs (and shared WHOIS) or perhaps some combination seems a leading candidate.
Could this of been the reason (it happenned to us once)
We had a big [domain.com] com site, 1000's of natural links in, high pr and it was doing well.
We then put up (by mistake!) the co.uk version of the domain as a single home page, with navigation pointing to the .com - 2 or 3 links in, low pr.
Google came along and decided the two domains must be the same company and as the server was in the UK, dumped the .com.
[edited by: Marcia at 4:48 am (utc) on June 18, 2004]
[edit reason] was non-specific, but "domainized" [/edit]
We had a big [domain.com] site, 1000's of natural links in, high pr and it was doing well.We then put up (by mistake!) the co.uk version of the domain as a single home page, with navigation pointing to the .com - 2 or 3 links in, low pr.
Google came along and decided the two domains must be the same company and as the server was in the UK, dumped the .com.
MHes -- thansk! Our case is similar but not the same. Both sites were .com and both had been around for the same length of time. Nothing new happened to either recently. And both got nuked.
[edited by: Marcia at 4:50 am (utc) on June 18, 2004]
[edit reason] domainized [/edit]
