google ban again?

banned forever?

[jimatrx9]

My site has recently been banned from google. I had hired an SEO to make changes and I believe that this is why I got banned. However I have since removed all code that he put on my site but I was just wondering Is it too late to fix. I noticed the postings were from 2003 on this subject and I don't know if google has changed their policy on unbanning. As I have said I believe I have removed everything that would get me in trouble but you can't even get google to respond just to make sure.

[Tom_Dalton]

This may be a general recap of info you could find elsewhere on the board, but here's a couple thoughts:

1. Are you sure your site was banned, and not just ranked much lower on your keywords? (Did your toolbar PR display change from some number to a solid grey?)

2. Sometimes rankings and toolbar PR fluctuate -- has it been more than a couple days since you noticed the apparent banning?

3. If you have been banned, removing all offending code is a good start. You might want to consider hiring a 'legitimate' SEO to look at your site for any other potentially bannable offenses. (Sometimes a site could be borderline spam, and then an SEO does something that kicks it into the red zone -- just removing the SEO's work will still leave your site borderline, and thus not a good candidate for readmission into the Great Google Festival of Sites.)

4. Once your site is wholly compliant -- with both the letter and the spirit of the Google doctrine -- send an email to [e-mail] with a full explanation of what happened.

Google's "official" answer to your question is still answered here: [google.com...]

==================

As far as I am aware, there have been no formal changes to Google's policy on readmitting sites. But then, the policy has never been that formal anyway.

Good luck!

[jimatrx9]

Thank you very much for that information. IT IS GREATLY APPRECIATED.

[allanp73]

I had one of my sites dropped without reason from Google. I tried writing them for several months. I gave up thinking they would never respond, but then months later decided to try one last time. They responded and say they would review my site and reinclude it. They also said the process could take several months. The point is Google is busy but they do try their best to help. If you run an honest site, then you should not have any problems getting back in the index.

[rogerd]

Be prepared for a slow recovery process, jimatrx9. Depending on the nature of the penalty, sites may not recover everything the lost, even after "reinclusion".

[ogletree]

It is very possible that there is nothing wrong with your site. Unless it is really bad Google does not bother with manual bans. If you can rank for anything even a 5 word phrase on your site you are not banned. Many sites have gone up and down ever since Florida. I have seen sites that have had no changes whatsoever come and go many times over since Florida. This weekend I saw a site fall off that has no SEO and is a very good site. It really makes no since. Just keep getting backlinks.

If they SEO you hired did do something that got caught in a filter then taking it off should fix it. Google is in some weird flux or rollback right now. I would wait at least a month before I worried about what Google does.

I have to have 2 sites for each some of my key phrases because one is number one on Yahoo and the other is number 1 on Google.

Just keep getting backlinks with anchor text.

[ChrisC]

I am relatively new to this, and have recently taken over the development of a new clients site .. We've re-built the site in .asp, and within a month of launch I now find the site to have a page rank of zero!

The same number of external sites link to us, and I have run through a number of SEO exercises .. yet the PR is still zero .. I am at a loss as to why? The link.

I can't help thinking that Google is looking at the site in some way that classifies it as spam .. and that this is being penalised ..

Is there any way of working out if you are being penalised at all? I've heard that page rank is made up of a number of factors, and that if they want to penalise you all they have to do is allocate you a ranking of zero to one of these factors ..

Here's the url .. <snip> Any ideas?

[edited by: Marcia at 12:24 am (utc) on April 27, 2004]
[edit reason] No URLs posted, please. [/edit]

[rogerd]

ChrisC, it's probably the fact that your URLs are new (even the terms page, for example, sports an asp extension) and haven't been given a toolbar page rank yet. The home page isn't PR0.

[t2dman]

You will need to take off the link from your post per "terms of service".

Either:
1. Google updates its PR every so often. Just a matter of time. Since you have changed the url's of a number of pages, those pages will not have got their PR updated yet.

Just make sure that you still have the inbound links needed to retain the PR.

or

2. Has Google cached your pages? Are you able to be found with a term that is unique to you? Does Google say you have any backlinks? It is either a matter of time for it to appear, or Google has banned you.

[ChrisC]

Cheers for the responses ..

The site I was referring to launched about 3 months ago .. It was completely re-built, and none of the old pages or old urls were kept .. Can this factor alone lead to a page rank of zero almost immediately?

If this is the case, how long can it take to get the page rank back to something respectable?

It's really frustrating, as the client now doesn't even rank well against a search for their own name ..

Thanks again for you help!

[IITian]

I checked the site before it was taken off and it showed PR2 on my toolbar.

[ChrisC]

Really!?

Thanks for that .. I'm on a Mac, so I don't have the Google toolbar installed on my machine ..

[jimatrx9]

If anyone knows the answer to this I would appreciate it. I have removed what I believe to be the offending code from my website as far as google. But what I have been trying to do is get ggogle to look at it and say yes it is clean or no you have to do this to fix it. It's difficult when you are sitting in the blind not knowing if you got rid of everything. For those that have given me suggestions before no my toolbar is not grayed out but none of my keywords come up either. I went from a PR5 to nothing

[PatrickDeese]

A likelier source of a ban is "shady link exchanges" - so if you have links to everyone and their dog, then there's a good chance that you should look there.

[jimatrx9]

thanks for your input but I don't do link exchanges.

[cabbie]

The first thing you need to do is to establish what penalty you have.If your pr dropped to zero from a pr5 then unless its a glitch in the toolbar then the penalty maybe quite severe and sometimes its better and less painful in the long run to start all over again.
your best bet would've been to put the site in your profile so sticky beeks at WW could have a look at it and suggest what the problem may be.Other than hiring another SEO (a good one this time) you may just have to wait and see if your site returns.
Good Luck.