Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
[webmasterworld.com...]
I'm sure many people, including myself are very, very pleased about this as it stops scumbag sites from stealing our content.
However, it also appears that some non-scraper sites have been included in this purge (including my own). My site has been active for 5 years and is based on unique content.
Has anyone else been effected by this, and does google intend to refine the algorithm to stop valid, unique content sites from falling victim?
Yes you are right if you are not actively participating in the link farm you cannot supposedly be banned.
Yes who you link to can also hurt you whether they provide a link back or not.
Besides the issue of who you link to ...there is another issue many miss when playing with links and that is the time factor.
Most authority sites that I researched (1995 & 1996) domain registered dates were the selection criteria and few of these sites built over 100 links per year or 1000 over a decade...or for monthly break down 10 per month.
how long did it take you to build 1,000 links? (If you did.. again no clue here)
All I can say if it was a matter of less than a year and depending on your categry you may see the answer....
Remember advertisers pay based on the average amount of eyes that could possibly view the ads. As such a billboard company does not return revenue to advertisers, because the road is closed due to construction or an accident or other such reason.
Don't forget for both of you, that even if Google hiccups,,you both should have a high bookmark rate with yor readers/visitors due to the nature of your websites.
Look in your stats from your webhost this will tell you usuallly what percentage of traffic is bookmarked / repeat visitors, if not I suggest you invest in a web analytics package."
Hi SEO1,
Thanks for your compassion and support. I do have a nice bookmark rate but I lost approximately 60% of my traffic since this happened. I understand what you are saying but I had to give the money back out of good faith. Hopefully one day I will get back into google and I will be able to deal with these people again. I just felt guilty taking their money based on statistics that were no where near what they were when they signed the contract.
Glad I could help... but keep an eye you should be back in Google very soon.
Peace
Seo1 - You seem very confident of that - do you know something we dont know ;)
I don't have any "real" link partners. But if a site submits an article I do have a link back to their site from my site. I have been looking at my site though and I have been wondering about a certain section that I have had for 4-5 years. Since my site is about one particular subject I have a resource section where I have outbound links to many societies, organizations and businesses that oversee the subject that my site is about. Maybe that is part of my problem. It's so frustrating though, because I really want my readers to come to my site and have the option of reading the articles on my site but to also be given the option of going to other sites to get more information. Plus this section took years to build up and took a lot of thought! Maybe in the end I should remove all of the outbound links. I hate doing it though, but maybe it will help?
I would not remove all your references. However I would check each one to make sure they aren't a link farm, i.e., look at their link submission page. If it says "Free for all" or post your link here no questions asked and it gets posted immediately, then it may be considered a link farm by Google and I would remove that one link from your site. Don't worry about them linking to you. It's what YOU do with your outbound links that can penalize your site.
1. Is your site on a shared IP address? (search for your IP number only--if not found then you may be). Other sites on the same IP can get banned for any reason (like being a scraper directory) and your site will be banned also. Hosts use shared IPs so they can offer cheap hosting but your sites suffers because of it. Solution--ask your host to provide you with a dedicated IP address, This should only cost a $1.00 more per month. Any thing else is highway robbery and you should change hosts. This should only take a few days to remedy, then write Google for reinclusion and tell them what you found.
2. Sometimes host companies do things that cause their clients to be banned. And even if you ask they won't admit it. I can't mention names here but there is one popular domain registrant and supposed "host" causing most of the problems.
3. To find out if your site has been penalized for another site on the same IP or your Host doing something wrong, find a site that checks your site for being "blocklisted" or "blacklisted". I'm not allowed to post the url here either but you can search for those keywords and hopefully find one.
4. Check your site for the www. vs non-www problem. Search for your domain with both. If they both come up and one isn't redirected to the other (you have to watch closely to see it change) you may be listed under two URLs in Google (check your site index to be sure). If so, search WebmasterWorld for posts on the 301 redirect to correct the problem.
5. Do you have too many links on your site and especially your home page? If it looks like a scraper site, with or without AdSense ads, that may be part of the problem. Move those ads elsewhere. Don't run Adsense on your home page.
6. Do a large portion of the pages on your website have supplemental results (duplicate content penalties). If so add original content to those pages. The problem with accepting articles from others is that often they have been posted elsewhere first and your site will receive the penalty. The only way around this is to add more content yourself before or after that article so the search engine will hopefully remove that penalty (it may take several weeks or months however). The best solution: do not accept articles from others unless they promise to not post them elsewhere or they just wrote it and you're the first site they have submitted to.
7. Does your site take over 1 minute to load on dialup. if so, it may deter visitors and also search engines won't wait either.
8. Last but not least--validate the code on all your pages and don't just rely on W3C as it no longer catches all broken tags. Use an alternate code validator.
The last two may seem insignificate but if there are several problems on your site and these occur also it may just tip the scale where the Google ban is applied.
What about reciprocal links directories?
Also unrelated homepage links?
On top of the search listings for those items are a selection of simple affiliate product lists in directories which have no relation to our sport whatsoever.
So looking forward to the day when this 'purging' of directories or whatever reaches us.
If anything, this year these sites have risen in the rankings which is a farce. Fortunately our visitors appear to be using our aff. links quite well as revenues are rising.
Lesson on writing content I suppose.
Peace"
SEO1,
I hope so, but I really don't see any light at the end of the tunnel right now.
Besides having a shared ip address what else can a hosting company do that can cause a site to become penalized?
I hope that google will look at me again. What I don't understand is how all of this works. If there are sites out there that have PR's of 6 and 7 and are ranked well and link to me how is it that when they are spidered and cached now that I don't get picked up.
I feel as though since July 28 when I was completely banned that there is a list that google uses and the websites banned are in big red letters. I know that I've said this before, but if you have been banned and you know that you have not done anything wrong how can you fix it if google won't tell you what is wrong. I am hoping that a shared ip was the problem. Maybe I was banned because others on my IP were banned for something, and my site got caught up in it.
Each time you mover to a new server you then extend the time it takes for Google to find your website.
As it looks like the next monthly crawl won't be till the end of August beginning of Spetember you probably won't see anything till after September 15 or so.
Clint
What I don't understand is how all of this works. If there are sites out there that have PR's of 6 and 7 and are ranked well and link to me how is it that when they are spidered and cached now that I don't get picked up.
PR is not an indication of how often Google surfs a site. If they don't update their site often then Google won't follow the links on that PR 7 site very often either.
Keep in mind that Googlebot and other search engine bots are not as up to date as modern browsers. If a site loads too slow they will go elsewhere.
One way to find out for sure is to drastically reduce the content of your home page (making sure it loads in under 12 seconds --the minimum for dialup) and watch the google cache of your home page to see when it's updated. Wait till the Google cache is dated after you changed the home page and then watch for results. The update in serps may take longer than the cache update however so don't expect immediate results.
Lorel,
Is it true Google is banning affiliate sites?What about reciprocal links directories?
Also unrelated homepage links?
Sorry I don't deal in affiliates so no experience there. However there were several threads on this topic last year as I recall.
Re reciprocal or unrelated links harming your site--it's who YOU link to that can harm your site--not who links to you--otherwise competitors could put everyone else out of business and the internet would expire.
If you link to a link farm or free for all site, that could cause a penalty for your site, but I doubt your reciprocal linking to a directory could cause a problem unless perhaps they are a scraper directory that was banned.
I check out each directory very carefully before submitting websites (clicking on their links) to make sure they aren't a scraper, but sometimes that's hard to detect.
The site started out providing web services. Grew by licensing world news and had AdSense on it.
Since the update we feel having Adsense ads was among the main factors for us being penalized.
We are working to have the penalty removed, but this update has been very challenging to get through.
Still banned though, keeping my fingers crossed.
I have some good news for you. If your sites were banned from the index for spamming you would never receive the reply that the matter has been forwarded to their engineers.
Not true; I have five banned directories, contacted google regarding each one of them separetedly and received the "we will forward this to an engineer" response. Not even a single site got back to google, even after their engineers have done the manual review.
Let me know, will you, when and if your site gets back into Google? By any chance, have you seen the Mozilla 5.0/Googlebot 2.1 bot spidering your site lately like heck? I have..
Strange thing: My homepage's cache was July 25th, the last day it was cached since this whole fiasco. Now it's cached for August 9th, but the bot doesn't really seem to be spidering at all, just the Mozilla 5.0 bot... which I don't believe to be the regular crawler.
Well then that should be an indication to you that something is definitely wrong in how you approached your websites.
However most who have received that letter and have quality sites are placed back in after a few weeks.
I wish I could be of more help to you but if Googles got a problem you need to find what it is and fix it..
Clint
Do you have a robots.txt file on your server and in the same directory (folder) as your index page?
If not you need one...googlebot seems to be ignoring sites without them or taking an even longer time to include in the index?
Clint
If not you need one...googlebot seems to be ignoring sites without them or taking an even longer time to include in the index?
Clint "
Hi Clint,
Maybe that is my problem. I wondered if that was it. If you have frontpage where do I go to learn how to put one on my site? I don't want to make a mistake.
Opps, Just realized there was a forum here for that. Posted my question there.
You would just put the text file on the same level as your index page on your local folder and then synchronize like you would when uploading new work from your local folder to the server.
Clint
Let me know, will you, when and if your site gets back into Google? By any chance, have you seen the Mozilla 5.0/Googlebot 2.1 bot spidering your site lately like heck? I have..
Whether or not your site was reincluded, googlebot would still be visiting your banned site and caching it. A little activity of the bots yes but they are still there, or at least of one them.
My guess is that there are caching bots, crawlers bots, ban checking bots, etc..
Well then that should be an indication to you that something is definitely wrong in how you approached your websites.
That's what am saying. Eve if you get the forwarding to an engineer ticket, that doesnt mean that your site is not a spammy one.
1. I never said it did it.
However not having one whengooglebot requests it each time is a good reason for delay in re-inclusion.
2. There is no such thing as google death penalty and you adding such only adds to undue hysteria.
There are bans and and filters applied to websites and pages for many reasons.
Lastly before annointing yourself an SEO, perhaps you should understand something so basic as the use of a robots.txt file.
