Ban for using ODP data?

Does Google consider this duplicate content?

[Taiwan_Paul]

I have a portal website, using mainly ODP data, that's been up and running for about 4 years now. Some of the pages have always ranked pretty highly in Google (ie. page 1 position 1&2) for a long time. June 17th the whole website fell off the face of the earth (or as good as):

Sorry, no information is available for the URL ---.com

Find web pages from the site ---.com
Find web pages that contain the term "---.com"

I haven't made any significant changes to the site recently, or any changes since the apparent ban.

So the question is: after 4 years what does Google suddenly find so offensive? Do they consider the ODP data duplicate content? I know a lot of websites must use it. Or am I doing something else wrong? I know there's a lot of cleaning up to do on the site, but it would be nice to know where to begin. And I don't want to do all that work if it's still going to be ban for using ODP data.

[kevinpate]

> using mainly ODP data

Iffin' it were me, I'd be lookin' hard at other aspects of the site. After all, doesn't it strike you as unlikely that G would ban a site for using
the same ODP feed G uses for the base level of its own directory offering?

[rbacal]

Iffin' it were me, I'd be lookin' hard at other aspects of the site. After all, doesn't it strike you as unlikely that G would ban a site for using
the same ODP feed G uses for the base level of its own directory offering?

No. It doesn't seem odd. What benefit does google gain from indexing hundreds or thousands of sites with indentical ODP content?

And, how in heck is this helpful to people who search?

If I was google, I'd turf every ODP clone, AND consider all but the original as bad neighborhoods.

[jomaxx]

ODP data is obviously duplicate content. That's very likely to be the problem. It's already available at dmoz.org and Google's own site, so I'm sure they feel little need to index that same data over and over.

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

For the sake of search I hope so ;)

[vladzakh]

Pretty easy, someone of your competitors, who uses the same ODP data complained about you, now he/she is THE FIRST. Looks like ever one complain enough to wipe out almost any site from the Google. By the way, would you mind to tell us how many pages did you have indexed on Google. If more than 500 of duplicate ODP data this would clear be considered as SPAM.
A bit more information. Google clear their index twice a month on 1st and 16th every month.
Good luck.

[fischermx]

Side note : Yahoo eats every ODP clone that popups.

[paradoxos]

What about WIKI data?

[sailorjwd]

I hate to be mean (ya right).

I hope every ODP, Wiki, scrappy SERP scraper site is banned from planet earth. And that goes for the snippy snippet snippers too.

<edit spelling>

[oldpro]

No offense intended Taiwan...

Directories with ODP feeds are redunant. I still do searches for a particular subject and often hit serps loaded with these directories. It makes searching like a dog chasing his tail...going around in circles and getting nowhere.

Given that plenty of your type of sites still ranking high something else must be wrong. Or either google is cleaning them out and yours was one of the first to go.

The ones I do still see indexed are those that have some relevant original or scrapped content on each catagory listing page.