Banned from all search engines HELP PLEASE

No intentional malicious techniques used

[stidj]

Hi guys,

My site was nearly completely banned and disappeared from altavista, google, ask.com and many others at one point today.

While previously being ranked extremely high.

Here are some things I did (tell me which of them is wrong):

* I added a lot of meta tags for keywords and description, and I used a few words that were not mentioned in the content.......such as control panel and Canada

* I repeated the words web hosting more, well not really instead I just added web in front of all occurences of hosting, hoping to catch more traffic

* This is the one that I think may have done it.....I submitted my site to several directories and I used .htaccess redirects to track how effective each directory is at bringing in traffic (to decide where to advertise).
eg. if the directory was "somedirectory.com"
I would submit my site with the url [example.com...] - then by going to the link mentioned, it would redirect to either [example.com...] or [example.com...]

Please let me know what I should do. I don't want my site banned everywhere :).

I have since removed less relevant metatags and notice that my site appears in a few search engines (but mainly extremly OLD cached versions that clearly were not breaking any spam rules)

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks everyone

[edited by: pageoneresults at 3:21 am (utc) on June 12, 2004]
[edit reason] Examplified URIs [/edit]

[VoteMan]

What got you banned was using the meta tags the way you used them.

The number one search engines today do not allow more than two occurences of the same keywords. Here and there they do, so dont get me wrong. It basically depends how they are used, and you used them wrong.

EXAMPLE:
-------------------------
WRONG--> web hosting, web hosting,

WRONG--> web hosting, web hostings,

WRONG--> web hosting, web host,

MAYBE--> web hosting, web pages, web designs, web,
Depends-^

GOOD---> web hosting, web, hosting, cheap, cheap web hosting,
-------------------------

Always remember that search engines look for the same keywords used more, but if it finds them to many times, they cancel the index and sometimes ban the url.

One good way around this is to seperate the keywords far from each other if they are kind of the same or maybe even the same.

Example:
web hosting, internet, designs, isp, ebooks, web host, free stuff, site submitter, link indexer, graphics, downloads, web hosting,

It sometimes works, but beware that spiders are getting smarter as time goes by!

[bekyed]

Hi,

I very much doubt that is the problem here as google completely ignores the meta tags, and only uses the description tag if your key phrase is in it as a snippet.

Sticky me the url and i will take a look for you.

I have done tests that prove google is taking less and less notice of on page factors, and is looking more at links and the quality of them.
If your site has been ranking high for some time you may have tripped a filter somewhere but i doubt you have been banned.

Bek.

[bekyed]

.

[edited by: bekyed at 10:19 pm (utc) on June 14, 2004]

[bekyed]

"Always remember that search engines look for the same keywords used more, but if it finds them to many times, they cancel the index and sometimes ban the url."

This is not the case, they will not ban the url only make the page less relevant and thus lower down the rankings.

Bek.