PR0 for hosting shopping carts?

Banned for file structure and backlinks

[classa]

I own a website that is set up for remotely hosted shopping carts for small businesses. We were at a PR6 in April of 2004.

Our current PR is 0.

I did notice that at one point we had a subdomain set up for our online demo that was demo.mydomain.com. We changed that to a be mydomain.com/demo/demo more than 2 months ago.

Our current structure is set up so that everyone has their own place on our server for their shopping carts. Here are a few examples;
mydomain.com/karl2682/
mydomain.com/manoyhae
mydomain.com/SterlingGems
mydomain.com/lotionsandpotions4

Basically, its mydomain.com/name_of_shop

Can we be penalized for hosting these shopping carts under our domain name? Is this viewed as spam? Some of our clients are doing adwords on their own to point to their specific shops, and some are doing overture as well to drive traffic. Each sub-directory functions as its own shop and they are marketed as such.

I have read the webmaster guidelines located at [google.com...] and can not see where we might be abusing any of the guidelines. I have practiced the same guidelines for this site as I have for several of my other sites that rank very well in very competitive categories.

We have contacted [e-mail] and they stated that we were being penalized, but gave no suggestions as to why.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

[edited by: vitaplease at 6:47 pm (utc) on Aug. 3, 2004]

[classa]

Any input at all?

[sabai]

Don't trust the PR displayed in the toolbar.

[classa]

Thanks, but I don't see the relevance.

I was told by Google that we did not meet their "Quality Guidelines" and I am asking if our structure is responsible for that.

[jimbeetle]

Hi classa,

Welcome to Webmaster World.

Two possibilities strike me:

How much control does each user have of their shopping cart pages? Check for hidden text and other usual on-page spammy practices.

Are any of your users participating in link farms or using any other external bad practices?

Since each cart is a folder on your domain anything one user does is going to impact the domain as a whole. Do some serious investigation to find out what's what. Not sure what steps you can take afterwards, but you might at least find something specific to explain the situation.

[classa]

jimbeetle,

Thanks for the welcome and the input.

The shop owners do not have control over the html, they just have control over the template (color, graphics, etc...)

They do have the ability to edit text on several pages (faq, about us, contact us, etc...) and upload pictures of their items. They can control their title, description, and keywords, but we have not seen anything as "spammy" from our clients.

We will review the structure of the templates though and look for obvious holes.

Could we have been banned for the subdomain and just not been added back to the index yet?

[jimbeetle]

Unless I missed something in your first post I really don't see any reason for the demo subdomain to be the cause of a ban or penalty of any sort.

If you don't see any obvious on-page abuses by your users, you should take a look at external possibilities: Did a user set up 20, 30, 40 or so keyword-loaded, heavily interlinked domains to drive traffic to their cart? That's only one example of a practice that Google would frown on.

I'm not sure about this, but you might consider setting your users up as subdomains (user.example.com). I think that would ease the impact on the domain itself and other users in case somebody acts up. Hopefully somebody who knows will be by to confirm or deny.

While you're at it, you might want to run through the WW Dropped Site Checklist [webmasterworld.com] to see if there is anything you've overlooked. It will also give you some leads as to what things to investigate concerning your users.