Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
My homepage was removed from the googe index, and the rest of my pages were filtered some time in July. I suspected a duplicate content penalty, because the day it started, an affiliate linked to my homepage with his affiliate link (www.mysite.foo?PARTNER=affiliateid). I worked to correct it; however, every time I found and fixed something, things just seemed to get worse.
I had always heard that sending google a re-inclusion request was a waste of time and that the only thing I could do was to wait for some penalty to expire. But, I read on WebmasterWorld that someone had recently had good results with a re-inclusion request, so, WTH... I submitted one on 10/8 and today, 10/13. My homepage is back.
It is possible that over the past few months, I found and fixed the problem, but the timing leads me to believe that I had a little help.
Original Reinclusion Letter 10/8/05
Google Canned Response 10/8/05
Reply to Canned Email 10/9/05
Google Reply – No Manual Filter or Penalty 10/12/05
Reincluded 10/13/05
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My re-inclusion letter
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Hello,
I believe that my sites, www.mysite.foo, or at least my homepage has been penalized or filtered. Although I am not an expert, I believe the penalization came about because of duplicate content.
In July, I got my first affiliate and when he linked to my homepage with his affiliate link (with its dynamic &PARTNER=affiliate), my homepage was dropped from the index (my pagerank went grey) and his link took its place. I fixed the problem, and his link was removed, and my page was re-included, but my pagerank never came back and I cannot even see my homepage when searching for my domain name.
So, I began to dig deeper and from your support documentation, found that I had both www and non-www pages in your index. Please don’t ask me how that happened because I only use www links on my site. To fix this, I recently initiated 301-redirects, which was difficult because I am on a windows shared server.
Most recently, I also learned to look for duplicate content by searching for a quoted section of text that I would expect to be unique to my homepage. With this technique, I found that another site was displaying my homepage content inside a frame on his site, and also that an archived newsletter on my site that I never meant to be indexed was indexed. Last week the content was changed on the other site and I included noindex metatags on the newsletter archive.
I’ve done everything I can think of to fix this and have no idea if what I have done has had any beneficial effect. I believe that our site provides valuable information about [site topic] and its inclusion in the Google index would benefit searchers, Google and, of course, me.
Can you please take a look and let me know why my homepage has been dropped and consider removing the penalty/filter if any?
Thanks for your consideration,
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Homepage removed in July
End July, beginning of August, added noindex meta tag to pages with?PARTNER=affiliate.
Beginning August, affiliate link removed but my homepage still missing.
Mid August, found www & non-www pages in index. Beginning of September got 301 redirect working.
Almost all pages except product pages removed from the index. End September found duplicate text from homepage on 2 other of my pages and on someone elses site. Rectified same week.
10/8 Initiated re-inclusion process
10/11 I removed my links pages just in case. Didn't want a Google engineer to have any excuse.
10/12 Response from Google - No manual penalty or filter.
10/13 Homepage back in index.
