Site Banned From Google - any hope for recovery?

[driller41]

One of the sites I own - an amazon associate type site has been banned from google - site:#*$!.com returns nothing and xx.com also returns nothing.

I dont know the exact reason for the ban, the site is 3 years old, is it worth trying to recover this site at all?

I would remove the associates and put something else up, no more than a days work as it may not be even worth this amount of effort.

So can banned sites ever return I guess is the query?

[tedster]

Quick answer is yes - the Reconsideration Request used to be called the "Reinclusion" Request and was exclusively use for 100% banned sites. That said, something major usually needs to be fixed first.

[mhansen]

So can banned sites ever return I guess is the query?

I would suggest that you make sure you are on the up & up with all other sites you own (If any) before you do a re-inclusion request.

The minute you click submit on the request form... a Googler may just look at:

- All your sites sharing the same Analytics account ID
- All sites you may be running adsense on with the same pub-id
- All sites you have in GWT (Google Webmaster Tools)
- Don't forget Google is a Registrar also and may use that info to preserve the value of their index.

If they find others like the one they dropped, kiss them goodbye as well.

I had a drop-ship/affiliate site dropped from the google index in late 2007, after 18 months, many pages of very useful and well linked-to content, and 4 re-inclusion requests, I gave up trying. Along the way, I watched a few other very good sites suffer manual reviews and very obvious penalties, some penalties which still exist today.

Bottom line IMHO... if a site was manually removed/deindexed, walk away from it, clean up all others and be prepared for the worse, just in case.

Just my .02 cents.

[tedster]

Good input. I don't think it's possible that every human reviewer rates exactly the same. And even though it takes a consensus of 5 independent reviews (if the patent is still accurate), i'm sure unevenness can creep in, both positive and negative.

I know of a site that was bounced out about a year ago, and the Google communicator at the time told the, it would never come back -- but three months later it did.

So nothing is set in stone, and unevenness in penalty situations can happen in both directions, for you and against you.

[driller41]

Thanks mhansen, that is good advice, I have quite a few amazon sites on the server and just this one is banned, I will not risk further collateral damage.

I will remove the Amazon stuff, just add a few holding pages and keep an eye on it, I wont invest more than a few hours of my time here.

[soxos]

Good call I think driller41.

Although, if its a good domain, you could always try transfering it to another name / server, and putting some fresh content on - hopefully that should wipe the slate clean to start a fresh?

[mhansen]

@ Tedster -

So nothing is set in stone, and unevenness in penalty situations can happen in both directions, for you and against you.

Agreed... I have seen some other penalties removed without issue.

@ Driller -

Please revisit this post and share what happens, what you do to the site, etc.

[epmaniac]

why was the site banned?

[driller41]

Nothing specific, the site was running an Amazon Associates script, but so are other sites I host and they are fine, I guess it is duplicated Amazon content coupled with too few links yielding a low quality score on the site.

[driller41]

I know this was a while ago, but last night I got round to looking in the files of this site, I noticed that I had put google analytics in the root of the site - obviously in the past I wanted this information from them.

So I am paranoid - did I give them too much information and got the ban that way?

There is absolutely nothing different about this site to the other 5 I run on the host - just this one has the google analytics setup - it has now gone of course.

[backdraft7]

Register a new domain & start over...that's what I'm trying with one site they never seemed to like. The site was clean as a whistle, but the domain name included "get", which from my experience, they don't seem to like.