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The site in question has had over 30,000 pages indexed in Google since mid January. It had a PR 5 up until late last night.
This morning, it shows a PR0 on all pages, and when I do the "site:" command, there are no pages in the index.
Does this indicate a penalty, or would there need to be a "graybar" for a penalty?
I am not linking into any bad neighborhoods, I do not have a page called "links", and I do not have any sites in bad neighborhoods linking to me...
I do, however, have many pages for individual cities and states, and some of the text across these pages is the same.
Any ideas? I have 6 different websites - all very different - and this is the only one that got nailed today.
It finally happened to me, and it is NOT a good feeling.
Thanks for any advice...
Dan
It was one of the first sites I created, and as it turns out it's a little spammy - which is probably why it is banned. Tons of pages with thousands of different city/states in them. Too much of the same text between many of the pages.
I'd appreciate some advice on whether to ditch the entire domain, or to try to clean up and trim down the site so that it isn't so spammy, and try to get reincluded.
LEt me know if anyone has a few minutes of time to take a look.
thakns,
dan
If so, were the 30k pages with slightly different text simply glorified doorways, or did they each have unique content that correlated to their text?
The same happened to me for all my websites of year 2004 ( but not for 2002 and 2003 ). 10 websites of mine were deleted after July 22.
Google vibrated and was spinning like a tornado. The pages appeared and disappeared by little differences of hours.
Now the Home Pages have reappeared ( with one exception that appears and disappears )
I can see my interior pages but only in the cache or as backlinks to other pages.
Two original content websites of mine were erased. Those sites have no ads, no spam, no tricks, no advertising, no Amazon, no eBay or whatever. Only serious scientific or psychology information.
Those two websites were purely original, not copies of other websites. I interviewed local people to gather ideas and material.
So Google is erasing Original Content Sites of 2004.
I have been doing searches in Google ( Medicine, Biology, Evolution, Genetics ) and I find a lot of Commercial Spam and Webmasters thar are experts in deception. They use scientific and medical terms and keywords to lead people to eCommerce, Filth, Dirt, etc ...
Vicente
How old is this site? months..years?
I think Google is monitoring new content more closely...looking for unrealistic numbers being created in terms of the number of pages showing up so early in a site's history..
Kaled.
I'll be the first to admit that the penalty is justified. It was the second site that I made - it is an affiliate site.
I finished the site last October, and it got indexed on January 15th of this year.
I had just learned web programming and went a little nuts with the dynamic content. Probably over 200,000 pages total of substituted words on pages, but way too much content the same.
It was a matter of time, and I was always nervous about it - once I had found out that I had done something wronge (created a spammy site).
But it was doing so well, I decided to leave it and see what happened.
All of the sudden, BOOM, PR0, and ALL PAGES GONE.
I spoke to someone that really knows the game, and he mentioned that Google's automated system typically won't do that, you will instead see a slow degradation of traffic over time. He says this sounds like a snitch - a manual ban.
Well, what I'll probaby do, eventually, is create another domain name and clean the entire site up, removing all the spam, and do it right this time.
Man, that $$ was nice while it lasted.
Thanks for the input all.
Dan
Of course, if you can spam google and make a ton of $$$ quick, more power to you - but I am in the business of websites that last. Good content, simple pages, content that is easily spiderable and quaility outbound/inbound links without any reciprocation (or very little).
The site that got reported to google and banned hurt me financially - and in the back of my mind I was always very worried about it. Once I started learning more about google and the search engines, I looked at that site and said "it's only a matter of time".
PR5, and I had over 60,000 pages in google at one time - it was pretty cool while it lasted. ;)
Anyway, cheers.
Dan
Although the poster here admits he thinks he was banned, the point is, Google is currrently dropping many sites/pages that are not duplicate content/spam. It seems as though they somehow just lose the pages for no apparent reason (ie they lost their own index page for a day). I caution anyone to not make dramatic changes straight away as G appears to be partially busticated at the moment :)
Yep, gaming the system doesn't pay in the long run.
Depends on how good you are :-)
The Googlebot dropped by again this morning, but I'm not optimistic about the site's main page reappearing soon.
In my case, however, it just happened SO SUDDENLY. One day, everthing is cranking a long like normal, then the next day, PR0 for EVERYTHING, and ALL PAGES out of the index.
I tend to believe something this drastic and sudden must be a ban. Of course, it's possible it's not which is why I am going to leave the site there for a month or two to see what happens.
The thing with continually gaming the system, and keeping up with algorithms - unless you do it for a living (an SEO), it takes so much time where you coudl be doing more productive things, etc. It's best, in my opinion, to build sites the right way - giving the SE's and the visitors what they want - relevent results, and relevant information.
More of a "set it and forget it" mentality than just running around chasing algorithms all over the place.
Dano
I checked my logs to see no Google referrels today and usually it is the top search engine.
I have been using FireFox for the past month so basically forgot about pagerank.
I had hundreds of forum pages indexed over the past 6 months.
I have just a few careful links and was a PR5 at index.
I checked with IE6 and I'm PR0'd!
site:domain shows nothing. allinurl shows no pages.
All my pages were wiped out of Google.
It was in Google last night. POOF! Today gone. I cannot for the life of me figure out why.
I did transfer the domain name from one registrar to another 2 days ago. That shouldn't effect anything as far as I know. :(
Any ideas? Last time GoogleBot visited me was last night @ 9:47PM. No visits since then.
I've been on this board 2 years now and honeslty haven't a clue why Google would wack this entire domain.
Help? I'm still in shock.
WB
Hundreds of pages, only the Home Pages were left.
If I am banned, then why does Google leave the Home Pages?
Is that an indication that they plan to spider and index again the interior pages?
Is there any damage inside Google?
Google is referencing many old pages of mine that don't exist ( I erased them long ago! ). Even Domain Names of mine that were completely erased.
Vicente
I feel for you man. The strange thing about my domain is that google is still spidering it hard core! Even though all pages were whacked out of the index, and I have PR0 on all pages, I am still getting heavily spidered...is this good or bad or doesn't matter?
Dan
I have 100,000 pages and only have a PR5, i have just put up 50,000 new pages
Oh come on - you've "just put up 50,000 pages."
It would take a cheap novelist a lifetime to write this; a good novelist 10 lifetimes; and a good poet thousands of years.
It takes me 5 days to write one page - because I am writing content.
I don't know which automated crapware you are using to put up this nonsense - but if Google blows it out, then I FULLY understand why.
I have NO sympathy whatsoever - suffer and stop spamming OUR Internet - and ditch the crapware.
I'm pleased to see that Google, despite its faults, can deal with such blatant abuse.
(p.s. a couple of edits were necessary to remove some of my expletives - your nonsense, combined with misguided indignation, makes me sooooo cross ;-)
Like MS-Windows viruses, where there's a constant arms race between the Russian mafia and the Anti-virus makers, Google is always looking for better ways to automatically filter out artificial link networks and duplicate content.
It is misleading to call what Google does "banning". What it does is "discounting." That is, it doesn't ban pages, it just ignores the obviously artificial links. What gets the pages knocked out of Google is the unfortunate circumstance that the ONLY links to them are the artificial ones!
In the same manner, it doesn't so much ban duplicate content as try to "merge" it - that is, pick one of the duplicate pages and list only that one.
If you think of Google as an algorithm rather than as a wrathful deity, you'll have a more realistic view of its capabilities (and shortcomings.) But it's all too easy (and all too human, and well for humans that it is) to think of a vengeful god striking where your conscience suspects it ought to -- even when a dispassionate observer would see only chance. So it's not "punishment", regardless of how much an observer would think punishment was merited. It is simply the best cut at automated detection of obviously useless content the Googletechs have come up with yet.
I did transfer the domain name from one registrar to another 2 days ago. That shouldn't effect anything as far as I know. :(
would it be possible that the above is being treated the same as an expired domain by whatever process google is using?
have you checked that your new record is showing the right dns servers?
perhaps just changing dns servers triggers some kind of treatment?
Yes- name servers are correct.
There is some speculation in the members forum about Google, for some reason, treating it as an expired domain.
I have an E-mail in to webmaster at Google. We'll see.
WB
And it isn't rocket science...for cyring out loud, even DMOZ can flag an exipiring domain! So why can't Google?
I caution anyone to not make dramatic changes straight away as G appears to be partially busticated at the moment :)
Joke in the Amazon Associates Forum :
Associate 1 :
"Google is going down hill faster than a pig on roller skates."
Associate 2 :
".... in a hurricane."
Google dropped my Original Content Sites ( no ads, no products, no offers, no copies, no spam ) and is indexing hundreds of my pages that no longer exist and that were long ago deleted by me. Some deletions were made 3 or 4 months ago.
But Yahoo and MSN are indexing the same websites that Google turns down.
Vicente
How did it drop your original content sites? One day, you woke up and the entire site was PR0 and NO pages were in the index at all?
Dan
How did it drop your original content sites? One day, you woke up and the entire site was PR0 and NO pages were in the index at all?
Yes, more or less, but some interior pages took like 7 days to disappear totally, and they vibrated in tides and ebbs.
15 websites of mine were destroyed by Google, but the Home Pages were left. They were slowly losing interior pages. The original content sites lost the pages at a lower speed. But finally everything was over and they also disappeared. ( minus the Home Pages )
Pages appeared and disappeared for all websites but with a final tendency to total deletion.
Some Home Pages ( 3 in total ) have been playing the baby game of appearing and disappearing for more than 7 days. Conditions change in an hour.
At the end everything that was left were the Home Pages. And the websites of 2002 and 2003.
Skeletons and Mummies inside Google :
3 deleted websites have never disappeared, even if the pages no longer exist. They were deleted 3 or 4 months ago ( by me ). But they are indexed ( Google's mistake )
Vicente
We'll see.
dan
Warning :
Many Praise Hymns sung here in this Forum!
Paeans were hymns of thanksgiving addressed to Apollo. They were joyous songs or hymns of praise, tribute, admiration and thanks.
But the Poetic Raptures to Google of these modern aedes with their Homeric lyres correspond to Truth?
Or are they just 'Thanksgiving' Odes to Google God?
Google deleted all my work of year 2004. But they left years 2002 and 2003.
So according to Google I was a useful webmaster during 02 and 03 but became a Garbage Spammer and Commercialist during 2004.
That is foolish! .... My work of 2004 is much better with many pages of PURE ORIGINAL CONTENT WITHOUT ADS, PRODUCTS, COPIES, REPETITIONS,ETC..... I have websites without a single product or ad.
I have made great progress in research, personal interviews to people, thinking with the help of others, even intellectuals.
When I do research on serious topics in Google I got lot's of garbage that has nothing to do with my quest.
That is the quality of Google!
Continue singing praises and hymns to Google until you are totally deleted of this whimsical index.
Or until Google is superseded by better search engines like Yahoo, MSN and new participants.
By the way, Yahoo and MSN have been registering my pages.
Vicente
until you are totally deleted of this whimsical index
Here's news for you: ALL search engines are "whimsical." Go over to the Yahoo board to see daily complaints of their sites dropped from Yahoo or "unfair" penalties imposed on their sites by Yahoo.
