My first ever banned site returns to Google after 2 years

[kidder]

A couple of years ago one of our main sites got a ban, we had over 30,000 members at the time and we did something dumb and got put to the sword. I very quickly removed the "issues" - all 20,000 pages of them and filed a reinclusion request. Nothing happend. That was over 2 years ago and we kept the site going with it's yahoo and MSN traffic but it has suffered accordingly. No reply from Google or communication...no surprise there. Today it popped up in Google to my surprise I had to read the URL 4 times before I could digest it... I just ran a site command and we have 24 pages indexed. Amazing.

[AnkitMaheshwari]

Congrats kidder...

[mirrornl]

congratz Kidder!
i understand how you feel, mine was back after 15 months

[kidder]

Well I thought it might have been a Google April fools day prank but it's still there. Does anyone have any idea on the status of the site now that it is back in the index, is it still and old site or is it now the same as a new domain? It dates back to about 2003...

[kidder]

Google gives with one hand and takes with the other - My banned site is still in the index but it's "sister" site is now banned? It's been an "authority" site with sitelinks for quite a while now..

I checked webmaster tools and it's telling me the pages no longer appear in the index. The crazy thing is that this site has been steady for years now and we've not had to do much if any SEO - now a lot of our expensive offline branding is going to an spam site - thanks Google! We don't rely 100% on organic traffic but it does help us turn a break even adwords model into a profitable business. The way it stands today we may have to shut down our adwords spending for this part of our business so at the end of the day Google and I are both going to come out of this badly. This stinks. I'm going to have to phone my adwords account rep today to give him a blast, I'm sure it won't help but at least I will feel better. Something a bit more helpfull in webmaster tools might help as well such as a reason for the ban not just a bunch of cryptic clues.

[maddawg]

This is interesting - do you think that Google knows you own both websites? Are the sites related in terms of the content?

Has anyone else experienced something like this?

[kidder]

Yes google knows we own both sites, they are related but niched in two different sub areas. We have been buying adwords traffic for both of them since about 2003. Both sites look the same and use the same scripts and of course have content relevant to their respective areas. If I had to nominate a rock solid site from our collection this one would have been close to the top of the list. We ran some DHTML ads in the headers of the blogs so I wonder if this might have been an issue? Any thoughts on that? I never considered that a DHTML driven advert might be a problem but it's the only thing I can come up with so far.

[tedster]

Did those ads pass PageRank? If so, you may have found the smoking gun.

[kidder]

No those pages don't pass page rank and I have to make an apology to Google. When I took the time to read my messages in webmaster tools they gave me a direct link to the page that was causing the "issue" and it appears the site has been hacked and there are viagra links everywhere.

"In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from myunluckywebsite are scheduled to be removed temporarily from our search results for at least 30 days."

"While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages were using techniques that are outside our quality guidelines, which can be found here: [google.com...] This appears to be because your site has been modified by a third party. Typically, the offending party gains access to an insecure directory that has open permissions. Many times, they will upload files or modify existing ones, which then show up as spam in our index."

Anyway at least I have found the problem and should have the site back in the rankings soon, the lesson here is make sure you have a good look around WMT before you start ranting. :) Now if I could just get my hands on the little punks that like the hack other peoples stuff.....

[adamxcl]

At least you made some progress and will have some results. It's much better than just wondering for years.

[tedster]

Was this content immediately visible to your through a regular browser - no googlebot user agent? If so, you were lucky to avoid the worse case.

These server hacks that insert cloaked content are really a major problem and apparently still growing. At this point it's the first thing to suspect if your site vanishes from Google!

[edited by: tedster at 4:35 am (utc) on April 7, 2009]

[kidder]

As soon as I opened the link to the wordpress page the links were very obvious. Just a bunch of html inserted into the actual post. It was an older version of WP so now it's current, also it is a subdomain linked to from the index page so it was enough to bring the whole site down - not just get the sub removed. That alone should tell a story about the way Google views subs these days. The other thing I notice is that all the page ranks are still in place so it's not at this stage a full blown "ban".

[kidder]

I thought I should just let everyone know that I fixed the problem with the site and filed a short but well worded reinclusion request. It's been a couple of days and our site is back in the index fully restored to it's high rankings. I think this is a credit to google considering the volume of sites they get to deal with and I am now happily eating my words from the top of this thead. My advice to people in this situation is to make use of analytics and WMT as it's worked well in this case.