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It was previously listed near the top of google for various keyphrases and out of the blue has been banned.
I cannot think of any reason why this has happened. I really need to know how I can get it back on google - what is the best way to resolve this?
Many thanks for your time,
Neil
[edited by: ciml at 10:56 am (utc) on July 18, 2002]
[edit reason] URL Snip [/edit]
This was a long time ago and (as I said) there was a lot of discussion about it at the time. I also had quite a bit of communication with Google about it. They intially e-mailed me to tell me that I was banned for using WPG. They did not say how they knew, but logic says that as I was:
a) using the URL verification function.
b) using WPG's tracking code on my site
c) offer a free position checking service on my home page
d) selling WPG
e) putting WPG reports online.
It was pretty much odds on I was using WPG for my ranking reports.
I promised not to do it again, removed the WPG tracking code, Google asked for some position reports (seeing where they ranked for the word 'google'), I haven't run a WPG report since and state on my free reports that I don't report on Google and that it is against Google's terms. They lifted the ban and life goes on :)
The consensus at the time was that Google looked for more than just the running of reports as this could be done by anyone, but also looked for other verification signals and, as such, it was highly unlikely that this could be done by one site trying to injure another site. So, for those who are worried - I wouldn't be.
Deleting this thread would only conceal information that I think webmasters will need to know.
Korkus,
Can you elaborate on why you think this is information that webmasters need to have? There is absolutely nothing you can do to stop it, and it can only lead to unscrupulous webmasters trying to get their competitors banned.
Pointless. I would assume by now multiple people have already saved this thread locally, and any attempt to censor it would mean they'd just put it up on a webpage somewhere, post it to Usenet, e-mail it to everyone they know (including possibly recommending using WPG to friends to sabotage the competition), etc. The cat is out of the bag at this point that using WPG against competitors might be an effective strategy.
I think you are being a little too quick to leap to this conclusion. As Brett said, this is nothing new and believe GG when he says that he doesn't believe that a competitor running WPG could harm you. All these concerns were voiced before.
Can you elaborate on why you think this is information that webmasters need to have?
I believe that what korkus was saying was that webmasters need to know that running WPG on their own site could get the site banned.
And once you tell someone that it isn't much of a leap for them to figure out that it could also get a competitor's site banned... so you can't cover up half the "bad" half of that information while making known the "good" half.
b) using WPG's tracking code on my site
Wait a minute... You're telling me that WPG users actually have to put code on their pages that reveal they're WPG users?
And you guys haven't figured out how Google spots you? I don't whether to laugh or cry, because it's funny and it's sad.
No, they don't. They offered a traffic analyzer with the package, it is up to you if you use it. It is the same as packages like Hitslink or other javascript tracking codes. Nothing to do with running ranking reports.
I have never used that feature. (Actually forgot it exists).
That's clearly the only way to penalize an actual site.
I have had PR0 on a few sites since last Nov/Dec. These sites are very old and had been in Google for 18 months to 2 years. In fact the problem started in June/July 2001 when the sites were completely dropped and re-appeared again two weeks later - if I remember correctly I believe rogerd noted it in a post around that time.
I have just checked these PR0 sites thoroughly and seen WPG tracking code on a number of interior pages.
The thing that was bugging me about these PR0 sites was the fact that I had a lot of newer sites in Google that were all on the same theme as these older sites but ranked very well with PR5/6. None of these newer sites have any WPG tracking code.
My only conclusion is that the WPG code is a major trigger. However I think Google would only PR0 a site if they identified automated keyword reporting AND tracker code on the site in question. I have not used WPG for 2 years but my competitors probably have!!!
I know the first thing I'm going to be doing tomorrow!
Wordy
They offered a traffic analyzer with the package, it is up to you if you use it. It is the same as packages like Hitslink or other javascript tracking codes.
OK, so it's not mandatory. Still, it's probably distinctive enough to be a "symptom", just like themeindex.html is for Zeus users. I know I wouldn't risk putting code on a page that could identify me as the user of banned software.
I never used the URL verification "feature" of WPG, never used the traffic analyzer, so no code on any of my pages. I just checked my old WPG folder to see when I used it last and it was way back on 6/2001 and the time before that was 11/2000!
If my site was (and still is) penalized for using WPG over a year ago it makes you wonder if a competitor might be involved somehow.
With all due respect, at the time of putting the code on the page, the software was not banned (it still is not banned - use of automated queries on Google, one of many WPG facilities, is not wanted) and Google was about as important as WiseNut is today. This is also no longer part of the WPG package and hasn't been for some time.
Wish googleguy would take a look at my site, too, since we made the same mistakes last year. But, you probably were very fortunate to post just as he was passing by.
Should you happen to have an overflow of business, I'd be happy to take the overflow hehehehe since nothing else is happen' here.
should be changed so that the penalties would be lifted for sites that are no longer doing the questionable things
Amen to that idea! From painful experience, it appears that some penalties can be applied automatically, but must be lifted manually. Combine that with slow e-mail response turnaround time and/or incorrect responses, and a business can be severely impacted.
It's easy to say "spammers should be punished and who cares if they stay out of the index forever". In reality, innocent sites do get trapped. Having WPG traffic analysis code on one's site in no way indicates the site is a spam site, or that the owner is running abusive automated queries. In the real world, things change. Webmasters get fired. Domains get sold. Pity the poor guy who inherits the job of working on a domain that is carrying a Google penalty that he knows nothing about. IMO, if a site is penalized because of the presence of something like WPG code, themeindex.htm, or whatever, that penalty should go away within a reasonable period of time after the bad content is removed. A webmaster could spend months trying to make his site squeaky-clean but never succeed in fixing the real problem.
Not being a professional webmaster and not being able to afford one, I have been blindly trying to fix things for almost a year now. Since I wasn't doing any of the things purported to be a problem I've changed all kinds of things in hopes I might fix it, but all for naught.
Looks like I will have to dump my domain which after three+ years and a lot of hard work is pretty well branded for my niche market and start all over again. I wouldn't mind so much if I deserved it for blatantly spamming or whatever, but 10 months of penalty since any infraction seems overly harsh, especially for a small one owner business.
[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 10:09 am (utc) on Aug. 13, 2002]
Maybe one of the folks here with a "Googleban divining rod" will wave it over your domain and give you a more detailed reply. Good luck!
As far as WPG, if Google is indeed taking steps to protect webmasters from nasty competitors, then getting penalized would more than likely require a regular pattern of queries combined with the presence of tracking code on the site.
Make sure you monitor Googlebot's behavior this month. The sites I've watched that did have a penalty, also saw a change in crawling. (Lots of index and robots.txt requests, but no deep crawling.
If you see Googlebot show up and crawl the site as it normally would, then you will more than likely show up next month.
Can you tell me if 'tracking code' on pages is a violation of Google's rules?
This is nothing sinister - I just want to track click-through's etc. on my pages, but if this is in any way against Google rules I won't include it on my pages at all.
It's a 'known brand' using Java code on each page, NOT the WPG facility and will not be used in conjunction with any kind of automated position checking.
I just want to be 100% sure I stay within the rules.
Many thanks
There seems to be a flurry of statements made about the Google issue, some of which I’m afraid are misleading or untrue. Let me try to clarify some things so hopefully this issue does not spiral completely out of control with rumor and speculation.
1. WPG 1.60 as well as WPG 2 will NOT pass the user's URL to Google when running keyword reports or verifying URLs. In the case of URL verification, it does a query on a keyword phrase and then scans the results for the user's domain name offline. I verified this with our development staff just to be sure.
Therefore, Google's server cannot look at rank checking queries from IP X and say they belong to a particular Web site and then ban it. Although they can certainly launch scare tactics to make you believe that if you check your rankings, your Web site will be banned, that has not been the case as we've observed it. If it were, we'd be hearing a flood of complaints from our customers (which we are not receiving any to my knowledge except for this one example).
Earlier versions of WPG1, mainly at the end of 2000 and first month or so of 2001 did pass the domain on URL searches but has long since been changed.
2. Those who have posted that it would take something more than simple rank checking to identify a "Web site" that is conducting rank checking are correct. As for using the WebPosition Hitslink Traffic Analyzer, that is not such an identifier. The script used on a WPG user's page is exactly the same as the script used on thousands of other Hitslink.com user pages. In fact, there are more non-WPG users utilizing Hitslink than there are WPG users. Therefore, to ban a site simply for having such a script on their page would ban many thousands of sites not using WPG. In addition, using the script is not an indicator that you are spamming or that you even use WPG’s rank checker as some people here have already stated (thank you).
Although the old WebPosition traffic analyzer service was unique to WPG users, the new service we switched to about a year ago is a public service, offering much more functionality, and is not specific to WPG. The only thing specific to WPG is that we secure discount pricing for our customers from Hitslink and the user's control panel interface sports a WPG logo on it. The script is the same as everyone else’s though.
3. As for whether a competitor could get your Web site banned, I'm sure Google is concerned about this and thereby is careful not to make assumptions that are overtly broad or dangerous. Since, as mentioned, the Reporter does not pass Google your domain name by default, competitors should not be able to get you banned via the Reporter.
In retrospect, I suppose that they could enter your domain as a keyword to rank check, but I'd assume that Google would realize that a normal user would be rank checking keywords that people might search for, and not a domain name. Therefore, they’d be trapping the wrong people. Just to be extra cautious, we will prevent queries where the "keyword" might be a domain name to discourage potential competitor abuse. Still, there are other rank checkers on the market a competitor might use that might pass your domain in various ways, so this is not a total solution. Essentially you must rely on Google to practice common sense in this regard.
4. In our defense, FirstPlace Software made numerous communication attempts to Google's management in response to their complaint at the end of 2000. For a period of six months, those attempts were ignored and put off. After extraordinary efforts, we did eventually receive a single response from a Google VP. We sent a detailed proposal of how we might work together to encourage the reduction of queries on their service, discourage abuse, promote their Web marketing services such as AdWords, and address other issues they might have if they could clearly spell them out. Some of these things required cooperation on their end to accomplish. Unfortunately, our proposal was not responded to by their VP. So considering the six-month history of calls, faxes, and letters being ignored, we deemed that the matter was in reality not that important to them and thereby dropped the matter. Since we updated the product long ago, we've had no substantiated reports of WPG customers being blocked or banned simply for running rank checks, so it’s been a non-issue.
5. In all likelihood, Web site CONTENT factors such as participating in link farms (which we warn about in our Page Critic) helped to red-flag Neil's site. The fact that speculation about WPG, made in a public forum at the same time, probably encouraged the association of the banning to be WPG-specific. Since WPG does not pass the domain name when doing rank checks, there must be other factors involved. WPG's Page Critic gives extensive advice on how to avoid using techniques that are likely to red flag a site for spamming, so while we hope that people follow this advice, some people will be too busy, or refer to other resources.
6. Since WPG emulates a search in a browser, to our knowledge, the only indicator that you are using WPG's Reporter rather than a browser is the number and frequency of your queries. Still, many IPs shared by 100's or users on a corporate network can produce large numbers of queries too without being automated, so this is not an indicator by itself. If it were, Google would simply ban every IP doing more than a handful of searches per day. In WPG2 we added a "Be courteous to the search engines" feature that will slow down queries and spread them out over a greater period of time. This allows you to be more sensitive to a search engine's resources while minimizing the chance of being unfairly red-flagged.
The WPG2 Submitter has the same feature to submit slowly and randomly over a user designated amount of time. That way your submissions are not discriminated against by a search engine simply because you want to save time and increase accuracy by submitting via WPG2 rather than in your browser. Since WPG2 warns you if you try to submit the same URL twice on the same day, or try to exceed known daily limits preferred by a search engine, or submit URLs that don't exist, it offers assistance in safety and accuracy not available via manual submissions in a browser. In addition, to my knowledge Google does not have a policy against automated submissions, only automated queries.
7. FirstPlace Software is committed to discouraging the creation of junk content, duplicate pages, and other common forms of spam. Our newsletter and Page Critic hit upon many of these topics. Here's an example of one such article:
[marketposition.com...]
8. WPG's name is often singled out, but in reality, it is the safest and best rank-checking tool on the market. That is why it is so popular. It should be noted that it is not WPG specifically that Google does not like, but any automated query tool.
9. We admit that we do have some concerns that Google’s Toolbar tool could be used to set cookies or other things to help identify people conducting certain activities. We have seen a forum posting earlier this year that indicated that Google may have used the tool to track down the author of a product that reported PageRank outside of the official toolbar program and demand he stop publishing such a tool. Therefore, although WPG does not record cookies or things that could easily associate your domain name to queries you do, we cannot vouch for what information the Google toolbar could communicate to Google’s server. If you want to error on the side of caution, consider using the toolbar on a separate machine and IP from all your other SEO work, whether using WPG or otherwise.
10. We recognize that online businesses have a fundamental need to measure their search engine rankings. This can be particularly true if they are paying a search engine to be included in their index. You can't invest time or money into a marketing effort without having a tool to measure your results. Part of that measurement comes from measuring traffic, but another part comes from measuring your rankings and whether they improve or decline over time. Whether you choose to use a tool like WPG to assist you in that, another tool, your browser, or not at all is ultimately up to you as the marketing manager. Ensuring your Web site is visible on the search engines is an effective, and for some businesses, essential marketing method. The desire to be found on the search engines is not one that is likely to ever change.
11. If you do use an automated tool of any kind, you should try to be sensitive to the needs of a search engine and not abuse their service. More specifically:
a) Avoid excessive numbers of queries. Most people do not have time to improve their rankings on 100's of keywords. Therefore, don't rank check on 100's of keywords if you don't have the time to do anything about all those rankings anyway.
b) If you choose to run queries, run your queries at night and during off-peak periods, which is something Google has suggested in the past. This is when many of their servers are presumably standing idle, waiting to handle the increased volume during peak periods. Our scheduler makes this easy to do. The scheduler ease of use and flexibility have been improved in WPG2 to further this goal.
c) Do not run your queries more often than is really necessary. Since Google normally doesn't update their entire index more than once a month, you should not have a strong reason to check your rankings more often than that.
d) I have heard that some people who are concerned about Google's statements choose to monitor their Google positions via the Yahoo Web Pages option in the Reporter. Although these rankings can vary a bit from Google.com, normally because the index is not always as up to date, it can be a reasonable alternative for some people.
e) Avoid spamming on your Web site (same color text as background, excessive keyword use, etc.) since this is by far the quickest and easiest way to get yourself red-flagged whether you use WPG or not. Our Page Critic gives extensive advice in this regard and is updated monthly.
In conclusion, we are not receiving reports to my knowledge of customer's IP’s or Web sites being blocked or banned. Therefore, I must conclude that when GoogleGuy said "We did another pass to turn off a chunk of domains that use rank checking programs recently" that they were trapping other rank checkers or automated query tools, and not ours. In fact, it would be difficult to say from Google’s end what automated tool a person is using since there are literally dozens of such tools and scripts on the Web. As you can see, it takes just a single statement or report to generate a flurry of messages here, and when there’s a real problem, invariably to our tech support. If there were a blatant flaw in our product, we would hear of it quickly from many users.
I also want to say Google has an outstanding service that should truly be applauded. The accuracy of their search results are some of the best in the business! Therefore, we by no means wish to promote the abuse of Google or any other service. We do hope Google realizes that the same people that financially support Google by buying advertising via AdWords and other services also have a need to measure their rankings. If they don't do that with the tool we offer, they will simply use some other tool, so this is not simply a “WPG” issue. With that in mind, at least in the case of FirstPlace Software, it is our desire to promote the responsible use of our product, to discourage SE spamming, and to work together with search engines and the Web marketing community whenever possible.
I hope this helps clarify things a bit. I’m sure there are many WPG customers lurking in the forum that can attest to not having any problems with the software, but who are afraid if they say anything that Google might look up their Web site and ban them. With that in mind, I thought it would be prudent to say some of the things that WPG customers may want to say, but are afraid to.
I also hope this message will not be deleted by the forum moderator as "advertising" since that is NOT my goal. I am only trying to address the questions, concerns, and rumors that others have bought up here
Your response is appreciated.
The fact that speculation about WPG, made in a public forum at the same time, probably encouraged the association of the banning to be WPG-specific.
Just for the record, the WPG association was made by Googleguy in post #20 of this thread. In that post, he clearly stated that WPG is what caused the site to get banned.
A simple solution to this problem would be for Google to provide some mechanism to show the ranking of a site for individual keywords. The webmasters would get the info they want (and are going to get anyway) and there wouldn't be nearly as much of a toll on Google's servers.
(BTW, Google still rocks!)
Because you are the leader in your field!
There are many of us who owe our introduction to our current livelihood to WPG (going back to the last century) - without it we would not have entered this strange profession.
Despite me being one of the first to suffer the Google ban and got their email response (which I sent to Brent at the time), I still promote WPG to users who want to try and understand the principles of SEO.
A tool should be used taking into account the rules of application. This is the same for a chainsaw, Colt .45, a car or WPG.
A tool should be used taking into account the rules of application. This is the same for a chainsaw, Colt .45, a car or WPG.
Thanks a ton
J. Janes
