Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
This is a site that has existed for years. I gave up on any kind of optimization for it years ago, and even went back and removed any optimization that I'd tried in the past (including the removal of links from other sites that I'd controlled). Instead, I've accepted a defeatist attitude toward Google, and decided to just make my site whatever I wanted it to be, and if Google liked it, then Google liked it. If not, then so be it. Whatever is there is for real people to see, not for Google. That was probably 3 years ago.
And here's what's really weird. Google finds absolutely no links to my site whatsoever. And when I check sites that have linked to my site for years, good high ranking sites, I find that my links are still there.
What on Earth?
Anyone?
I've really got two questions here: 1) WHAT happened? and 2) Why?
I've received no reply of any kind at all. And my site is still not included.
My site is in the local travel industry. It's a very clean site with fresh content (no duplicate content) and original photos, articles, etc. Since I am a local, I can write content related to my travel niche. The site originally was a PR4 (may have been 5, I don't remember anymore) and since early/mid October, it has gone down to ZERO (white PR bar).
I did a site:domain.com and all I get is results from my messageboard posts. If I do a link:domain.com I get ZERO links. Of course, I did a search and found sites linking to me (official city websites, visitor guides, etc).
Does anyone mind sending me a message and looking at my site? As far as I know, it's all white hat stuff...but I did do 301 redirects from some old pages (this was back in September) to show Google that I no longer have those pages up and instead, wanted to redirect to my new pages.
Thanks for any support.
Jagger 3 is supposed to resolve some 301 issues but if you see nothing in a few days do a reinclusion request and follow up with support on a regular basis. I think they are overwhelmed and it's hard to get through.
Webmasters shouldn't be changing for Google in the first place. Google should be adapting itself to the web, not the web adapting itself to Google. Isn't designing without search engines in mind the very thing a good search engine should want?
Google has too much power. Google Earth, Google News, all kinds of neat things...they're very shrewd. These things will probably prevent their web search site from falling by the way of Alta Vista, as it truly should. Oh well.
On 18th October the PR bar on all sites went white (0/10) and I have had only 1 referral from google (and it was an invalid url) since then. Site: and link: find nothing on google.
Googlebot still visits all sites several times a day.
A cache: search for www.mysite.com gives a cache page for all of the sites with dates from May 05 to October 05.
If I search for mysite or mysite.com all of my sites have some inbound links from sites which have scrapped a few lines from one of my pages, but as far as I can see just about every website on the net has that.
I'm sure this is a penalty from Google, because the traffic from them stopped completely, but there is nothing common across all the sites as far as I can see. I am just guessing as I try changing things to see if anything changes.
I think an automatic note from google saying we're dropping you for ever, or until you fix xyz, or whatever is the case would be reasonable. For sites that sell to one time buyers, the sudden loss of revenue that this causes could be catastrophic.
If anyone sees their google traffic coming back from this, please post so that the rest can have some insight into how long it takes and what might have been the cause.
I'm not sure what you could mean by "a hoax post". I have certainly told the truth, but I have just as certainly not told the whole truth. The whole truth would require an endless report of all things that I can think of with regard to this matter, and even things that are pertinent to the matter which I cannot think of.
My issue here is (though I'm not sure that this started out as being my issue) simply the conduct of Google. It's not so much a matter of how to get back into the database, but more a matter of how being thrown out of the database reflects upon Google itself, as well as how Google's lack of response reflects upon Google.
I am annoyed at Google, not so much because of being tossed out of their database, but because - as a webmaster - I now have to take Google into consideration when I build my sites. It used to be that people who used search engine optimization were the "black hats", the bad guys, the ones Google was against, but now we have to optimize for Google according to its standards? That turns the equation upside down, in my opinion, and puts the black hat squarely upon Google's head.
For example, here's something that I've never thought about even once until reading this board: duplicate content - and how it affects me. I routinely post duplicate content all over the freaking web. The most common example is political content within my weblog. Very often, that content is generated first, by me, as a response to someone else on a message board somewhere. After posting the response in question, I think, "Hey, this'd make a good blog entry", and - *click*click*click* - it becomes one. I've now posted it in at least two places. It is then not unusual for me to copy/paste all or part of it into responses on other message boards or in responses on other weblogs. Duplicate. Duplicate. Duplicate.
Now, this is just plain normal. It's appropriate use of the Internet. There's 100% of nothing wrong with it, nothing whatsoever. (In fact, you might notice that New York Times, Associated Press, and other institution's articles also get posted all over everywhere. It's normal.) But Google is now telling me that if I don't refrain from normal Internet use, I'll suffer in their database? This is not the mark of a good search engine, in my humble opinion.
Also, my weblog is hosted on the same server (i.e., same IP address) as my now disappeared website. Guess what's happened to my traffic to my weblog since my other site disappeared? That's right - it's search engine activity has been reduced. By how much? It's getting about 20% to 33% of the traffic that it used to get. It's perfectly normal for people to put their sites on shared servers. In fact, it's not merely the norm, it's what people should be doing, as it conserves resources. But Google's search engine punishes for such things?! (Actually, it takes away rewards - but let's not mince words.) Google punishes simply for doing the normal, benign, natural thing? This is okay?! (Incidentally, this is a new development. My now disappeared website used to be on a different server, but it's previous host changed its software and could no longer accomodate it, so I placed it on my own server.)
My weblog site has one - and only one - link to my site which has since disappeared from the Internet. Just one. It exists on a page referencing the same kind of material as my now disappeared site. Earlier this year I created two more websites: one with a(n assumed) previously unregistered name, and one with a name that I bought at auction (the latter being the url of a presumably defunct "bricks and mortar" business). One of these I set up as a personal site for a pet, the other I set up as an affiliate site based upon the same type of products as the bricks and mortar store that it previously referred to (my actual point in doing that was as a sort of web design "display model", and not to receive affiliate income, although I wasn't going to turn away any if I received it [in fact, I've received zero, zip, zilch, and it's been about 9 months]). ONE page on each of these sites (they each have only about 5 pages, total) has content which is similiar to my now disappeared website, so it, of course, was linked.
Now both of these websites, for separate reasons, I've wanted to have listed in the margins of every page on my weblog (look in the margins of people's weblogs - this is NORMAL; people have Google Ads, BlogAds, links to their favorite weblogs, etc.), so I put them there. I added the links, rebuilt the site, and - VOILA! - suddenly these two 5 page sites have about 1000 new links (albeit from just one domain) now pointing at them.
THIS. IS. NORMAL.
By "normal", I mean that it's what normal, every day people do each and every day with their websites WHEN THEY'RE NOT taking search engine rankings into consideration.
But, based upon what I've been reading in this forum, I'd bet a shiny new nickel that the reason my website plunged is because:
A) all of those new links (around 1000) from my weblog pointing at those two sites I made 6-9 months ago boosted the page rank of those two sites considerably, and
B) those two websites passed that page rank on to my (now disappeared) site, which annoyed some pencil pusher at Google.
Now the point is, these are just the ordinary type of thing that any naive person making websites is likely to do if they're not taking search engines into consideration. But now, it seems, that a web designer cannot be naive and design websites in good faith for their consumers. Instead, the designer must take Google into consideration, and optimize for Google according to Google's standards.
This does not make for a healthy Internet. The Internet should not be designing itself around Google. Google is not the Internet, and we shouldn't be allowing it to be so.
So now with my suspicions about why I was dropped firmly in my mind, I'm faced with a choice: Change to accomodate Google? Or not?
* First off, I loathe the idea of altering my practices to accomodate Google. However, all of the traffic that I was previously receiving from Google was valuable to me, and I'd like it back. If I thought that I could get it back by bowing prostrate to Google, I'd probably do it.
* However, despite my inquiries to Google, and despite my grudging willingness to accomodate Google's required optimization for Google, I have no reason to believe that paying this price will actually pay off in being re-included in Google's database.
So, I suppose that I'm no longer posting from the perspective of wanting help, but instead posting from the perspective of social commentary about Google. I'll say this, though: years ago I was praising Google to everyone, in print and in person; now, I've never before been so open to what other search engines have to offer.
I'm lucky that I work for myself, but I didn't always. I like, when things get tough, to picture myself working for a former tough but very successful boss, and explaining to him why things are tough.
I can hear him clearly ask me about the risks with my business model, and what I am doing to mitigate those risks. In the case of google suddenly dumping me, I have not done the things that I should have. I have a number of income streams from my sites, but adsense revenue was more than 50%, and it was based on google referals.
I have built a reasonable sized list over time but was not exploiting it, which would have reduced my dependence on google. I was not even collecting list subscribers on all my sites! (Just shows how comfortable I felt).
The last 2 weeks have focussed my attention on having more income streams and I now picture myself in an interview with my former boss every morning. It keeps me focussed on what will produce results quickly, rather than the bad habit I had got into of focussing on what methods to achieve results I like best.
In spite of all that I think that google should be more accountable to the webmasters that contribute to Googles shareholders feeling good, at least as much as they try to make their searchers feel good. They might also succeed in doing both much better if they put more focus on the former. Effective communication does cost in terms of people to provide it, but I think the results in terms of search quality, and profitable revenue would more than compensate.
Time to go back to writing a couple of new content pages and finding a few worthwhile sites that will link to me.
Would Google respond in any of meaningful ways if I ask them for the reason for the decline of my pages? Doesn't this look very much like that the whole thing is because of a sudden jump in number of backlinks?
when I do a site search by putting my domain name in quotes , "mydomain.com" without the www google returns 9600 results...if I do the same search with the www included it returns about 900 results..
I dont understand,can someone enlighten me?
when I do a site search by putting my domain name in quotes , "mydomain.com" without the www google returns 9600 results...if I do the same search with the www included it returns about 900 results..
Using "mydomain.com" will return every text occurence of mydomain.com, including those that are part of the text www.mydomain.com. Using "www.mydomain.com" is only giving you that complete text occurence. Apparently, there are a lot of text mentions of your domain that don't have the www on the front. It might be indicative of a canonicalization problem.
(At least that's what I believe is happening - sometimes this stuff just makes my head hurt and it's hard to be sure.)
I believe that to be true and is now what I do...I am not to concerned with the serp's...true I dont want to see the keywords/phases that are indicative to us to plummet, but I am not going to spend hours and hours trying to outhink the search engines, had rather spend those hours creating fresh, new, unique content...
if I do a site:mydomain.com -www it only returns about 200 results for mydomain
<edit>Misread it the first time.
But those are just on your site and are separate from your "mydomain.com" search.
Your search of "mydomin.com" looks for text occurences on all G listed sites. The site:"whatever.com" isn't a valid command, so I assume you were just doing the url in quotes thing. As soon as you did the site:yourdomain search, it was whole different thing - it was just examining your own site.
(Still in the head-hurting mode, of course)
One of my sites is a 'build your web-site in 30 minutes' type site. There is very little that you can do except decide what sort of page you want, and put some text and graphics on it. You can use html to format the text, but most of the control is in the template you select which can't be changed.
I have had a page called events, which is just a diary or calendar where I post details of upcoming training etc. I also have about 20 pages of content, linked from the index page, and another 30 pages that are places to download stuff, and autoresponders etc.
For over a year a site:mysite.com search showed anywhere from 59 to 87 pages. When I checked on the 12th September I discovered that sometime in the previous 7 days google had found another 12,550 pages on my site. I had a look and they were all calendar pages. I thought no more of it until yesterday when I was reading googles Ts&Cs again. Hmmm would 12,550 pages that looked exactly the same except for a date field that rotated to make every page in some way unique, look like a doorway page?
I removed my events calendar and filed a reinclusion report. So far only the automatic response which I replied to.
That still didn't explain the other 7 sites which went the same way at the same time. They are all sites that I run a homemade CMS on. I feed the CMS a pile of keywords and it generates templates for each one. Then I add some content, select a page from the templates to put the content on, and the CMS then generates or modifies links as required to include that page on the site. No problem here I think.
At 4am this morning a flash bulb went off in my head! Last July I installed sitemaps on all these sites. After a week or so I noticed that when the sitemap cron job kicked in it used quite a bit of bandwidth as it crawled the site, so I changed the setting on all sites to scan the local file system instead of crawling the site, and haven't thought about it since.
Guess what? My CMS creates the templates from the keyword list in the directory that the completed pages are in. These templates have links to the home page, faq page etc already in them. Also metatags populated to suit the keyword. Nothing links to them so no SE problem, until they appear in the sitemap, that is.
The site that I tested the CMS on had 6,000 of these templates lying around that I had not cleaned up, and all the others had over 800.
I think that this drop to PR0 and no pages found, is a doorway page problem. However I am surprised that google can't recognise a calendar when it stumbles across it.
Could this explain why anyone else is having this particular problem?
You apparently know how to write Google. I couldn't figure anything useful from [google.com...] forgive me. Could you kindly give some more advice on how exactly can I write them?
Thanks in advance
Even if we type in domain in the search bar, no results other than those sites that link to us.
Google still has a cache of our site. It has been close to a year now. Any suggestions?
We get great traffic, but 0 from google.
I was within the first 5 results in Google but nowhere in Yahoo. So, for the first time, I decided to use an automated link-building method.
It posted about 3,000 blog comments for me. And then, to my horror, I found that GOOGLE HAD BANNED MY SITE!Apparently Google no longer condones automated comment posting on blogs that have enabled it.
So STAY AWAY FROM <blog submission software> unless you want to suffer the same fate I did!
Lucky
PS: <snip> gave me excellent support while I was a user. But when I asked her for a refund, she simply did not reply. I finally asked Clickbank for the refund, which they they gave in 24 hours.
As I said above, I put on all of my weblog pages, about 1000 of them - on my OWN weblog, remember - links to two of my other sites, and each of those sites had ONE link to my now apparently banned site.
I wish Google would say, explicitely, why my site is now gone from the index. If its for something legitimate, fine...but it sure looks like a false positive to me.
I see that the other thread is not altogether convinced that this could cause a google ban, however it would also explain my problem. I have been looking everywhere for one thing in common with all my sites, and the fact that I used automated blogging software is a common thing. I have not used it for some time, and today deleted all the blogs.
The bit that I can't get my head around is that I could use the software to promote anyone's site. If that gets you banned, it seems silly to worry about promoting your site, just autoblog for your competitors. I really struggle to believe that google would do something that would promote nasty tactics like that.
The other thing is that the only way that I can think of for google to do this would be to recognise some sort of footprint in the posts. I'm sure they are there, but you can also use the software without breaking googles rules. If I write say 10 articles on a particular day, I put them on my site, but I don't tell my blog about them all at the same time. I put them in the blogging software and set it to release them one a day. They generate more traffic that way.
But just in case this is what google wants, I have emptied every blog, and I'll fill them up again manually.
I see that the other thread is not altogether convinced that this could cause a google ban, however it would also explain my problem. I have been looking everywhere for one thing in common with all my sites, and the fact that I used automated blogging software is a common thing. I have not used it for some time, and today deleted all the blogs....
But just in case this is what google wants, I have emptied every blog, and I'll fill them up again manually.
I'm just a little bit lost here, but I do want to make one thing clear about myself and my apparently banned site: I DID NOT use any automated weblog submission software for spamming anyone's weblog(s), nor did I ever do any such thing manually. Further, my opinion is that anyone who has ever used any such software should not only have their sites banned from Google and the other search engines, but they should also be drowned in their own vomit.
Moving past that, I can't tell whether you're saying that you used such software, or not. The first paragraph I quoted above seems to suggest that you did, but then you say, "I have emptied every blog". And since you can't delete anything from anyone else's weblog (the ones you would've been spamming), that doesn't seem to be what you're talking about.
So I don't really know what you're saying, here.
I, of course, as I said above, added a link to two of my other sites to my weblog template, so when I rebuilt it, I instantly had about 1000 links to them on my own weblog. Those other two sites linked to my own site (the one that seems to be banned), so maybe those links passed a lot of page rank onto it, causing it to be banned, or something.
My point is that the software can be used in positive ways or negative ways. If google just detects a footprint in the blog posts, and doesn't look to see if the post content is good, then it is penalising sites that are not spamming.
As my sites have been penalised, and I am not spamming, I deleted the contents of my blogs, just in case. I have left the full articles on my website, but removed the blog which actually just announced the articles anyway.
I've also removed all my calendars as google indexed them for years ahead, which might look like either duplicate content or doorway pages.
In the same way that businesses often do un-natural things in reaction to changes in tax laws, I am doing un-natural things in reaction to changes in google's law!
I agree with your rather graphic description of your prefered outcome for people spamming other people's blogs.
I'm not sure if we can deduce anything from this but possibly a reinclude request does work, and possibly having a calendar on your site could get you de-indexed for spamming.
I'm not going to put the calendar back on the site just in case.
I've not mentioned it, because I wanted to wait for the next step, but I finally receive correspondence from Google on the 7th of this month (November). All it said was:
Thank you for your reply. We understand your concern and have passed your
message on to our engineering team for further investigation.We appreciate your patience.
Regards,
The Google Team
I've not received anything since, and I'm still not in the index.
I saw a large drop in google traffic but thought it was due to Sept 22 or Jagger. I really didn't investigate too much because I thought I would wait and see.
A few days ago I noticed some PR0 pages. My homepage is showing PR4
Today by chance I tried
link:www.mysite.com and nothing is returned.
I do get something back for site:mysite.com
I get no results for
related:mysite.com
cache:mysite
etc.
I have other sites on this shared hosting account that may link between each other but there are plenty of links from elsewhere. The other sites are fine.
This particular host was down for 2-3 days during the huricane that hit Florida.
I wonder if that is the issue?
About one year ago, our pr went to 0 and our site is nowhere to be found in the google index. Moreso, when you type in mysite, it doesnt show up in the results. BUT when using www.mysite.com, it appears and has over 2000 pages indexed with google. There also is a google cache of the page.
Any advice? Does this mean we are being penalized? How/what can we do?
