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Has anyone actually recieved reason to their website being banned directly from google? Has anyone recieved an answer as to when their website would be possibly unbanned if banned? Last but not least has anyone appealed their website for being banned.
These are issues we have regarding our website listing in google. We would enjoy hearing what other businesses have experienced in regards to this issue.
I presume if a website is banned the owner is considered evil?
Then you presume wrong. But you will never accept that.
If a website was banned, it was because google is not interested in listing that site on their own site for some reason.
I myself do not list any of DerekH's sites (at least that I know of) and I am not expect toprovide any reason at all for my decision.
See SearchKing v. Google.
Who are they referring to when they say "Don't be evil"?
Themselves.
Oh yeah, I lied to you earlier. We never provide good answers here. This site is totally worthless. You really should consider some of those much more useful sites instead of wasting your valuable knowledge here.
In fact I am wondering why our company website is not listed
Your site crosslinks and is full of HTML errors. 100s of them!
FIX THEM!
I'll offer a couple of items to start, (although having never been booted from G, I'm no expert): Hidden text; link-farming. Maybe you could add to that short list yourself?
Go on believing we are all negative and know nothing. Good luck to you and best wishes for a happy and prosperous holiday season! :)
Not to put a damper on things, but don't be surprised if it jumps in and out a few times.
Of course bouncing around a little bit is better than gone. Hopefully it will stay in the index more than it is out, ant that your holiday season is in the black.
And sorry about that first impression about us, but sometimes people get a little exasperated when talking to a brick wall.
I was wondering, I had some text links to my other sites, with very little cross-linking. It's never been a problem before - any opinions? I could aways turn them into image maps instead...right?
cdnmarket: "Has anyone actually recieved reason to their website being banned directly from google? Has anyone recieved an answer as to when their website would be possibly unbanned if banned? Last but not least has anyone appealed their website for being banned."
I don't believe this will ever happen (except in a few isolated cases). There are millions of pages on the web that don't conform with Google's quality guidelines, whether it be forms of cheating or just plain bad construction. Many of them, no doubt, either don't get into Google's index or get removed, mostly automatically rather than by direct human intervention.
If you were running Google, what would you do, other than to make clear what your quality guidelines are? Suppose you offered to inform webmasters when and why a site has been dropped. What would you do? You might do a full (free?) site appraisal and eventually be able to say "your site has been removed because it contains too many coding errors" or "you have too many pages with similar content" (or, as the Emperor said to Mozart, "too many notes").
What then? The webmaster does something about it and goes back to Google, but Google still isn't happy, so the webmaster does something more, and Google still isn't happy, and so it goes on... until maybe at some point the site/page is crawled and added to the index. But then a short while later the webmaster does something more to the site, taking it back outside Google's quality guidelines and it gets taken out of the index again and the whole cycle repeats itself.
Even if the site is re-added to the index, maybe the webmaster isn't too happy with its ranking and still believes the site is penalised in some way, so Google is contacted again, and so on and so forth.
Imagine these processes repeated perhaps billions of times a day, and the resources it would consume, not to mention who would pay for it. It simply isn't workable, even if Google was minded to do it.
I would imagine there will be a few cases where a webmaster is able to communicate directly with Google because the site is so important to Google that avenues are opened, but obviously your site isn't one of them, and neither is mine.
I can well imagine your frustration at your site not being in Google's index, but realistically, what would you do if you were Google? How would you make a webmaster feedback system work, and would it still be free of charge? Seriously, let's hear your detailed proposals.
If Yahoo can charge $299 for an express directory review without promising to add to the directory, then Google could come up with something as well that would satisfy everyone involved. They wouldn't have assure high ranking, but at least people would know why they were getting banned. When Google is boasting about indexing 8 billion plus pages it's a little hard to swallow why yours got banned when you have no idea why.
All they'd have to do is charge $99 (or more) and let people submit their site to a program that would scan their site and email them what the problems were that their spider was catching.
Sites already exist where one can do that for free: SIM spider and W3C's page validation service for example. Spidering probably isn't the main issue - it's indexing, where a page or site might, for example, contain too much duplication of content, or links to bad neighbourhoods, and all the other spammy things that are discussed regularly in this forum. The program you're suggesting is actually Google's algorithm and filters, and they're providing a feedback service to webmasters through their search engine.
Even Google might not be too happy that inadvertent and innocent errors on the part of ethical webmasters can result in sites disappearing for no obvious reason, but what is a practical solution in something that is essentially a giant contest?
That's right, and some people may have ulterior motives if you read between the lines. ;-)
I think what people fail to remember is that the majority of folks out there aren't professionals
And this is the major problem with the pay model, it favors those professional sites that are willing to pay repeatedly to stay on the "just legal" side of the line.
You example of the yahoo directory is a perfect example of the problems. Before they went with a pay to play model, it was a very useful directory. I would even say better than DMOZ because they were paying people to review the submissions in all areas.
Now, I only know of one out of a couple dozen not for profit sites that have applied for free inclusion that have made it in.
It isn't a grad student working on some cool new thing that is going to be paying google for site review, it will be the businesses. And google has always shown a preference for the grad student over the business.
I came here to get answers regarding how a service could have rules or regulations with no accurate literature.
cdnmarket - your lack of research is getting quite frustrating. Why don't you go and read Googles rules and regulations and literature at their website. How can you say it doesn't exist?
Start here: [google.com.au...]
Then read this - the Google 'Terms of Service' [google.com.au...]
I'd draw your attention to this little limitation in the terms of service:
The Google Services are made available for your personal, non-commercial use only. You may not use the Google Services to sell a product or service, or to increase traffic to your Web site for commercial reasons, such as advertising sales.
:)
Does google have these so called "Banned Websites" with notes to themselves regarding why the website is banned?
Would google just ban the IP, ban the domain name, without any notes whatsoever? Hard to say, something to think about.
I most certainly would feel more comfortable if google had an excuse for banning a website when asked why a website is banned, but also provided an answer for sure whether "yes or no". The unpredictable guessing will just make website owners get upset if they cannot find the problem. Who's to say a website isn't flawless, and there are no problems. What if a business purchases a domain name that has been banned? How does the business know? How would the business ever know if it was banned or not? This opens an incredible amount of questions and possibilities that are simply undisclosed.
I am going to take this a step further...
Webmaster World is not Google or spokesperson for Google, even though this forum has given you many free answers from Googlewatchers with a lot of experience.
Did you actually read Chris_D's post? That, really, is all that needs to be said on the matter.
What if you feel your website does abide by the rules and regulations, and is banned with no reason?
Where does it say timelengths regarding bans?
How do we even know if its banned or not?
Are we supposed to sit here with our fingers crossed?
These are the questions and concerns I am sure many have. In relation to this banning technique, there are MANY more questions about HOW the banning is done.
As I stated above, I would simply guess there would be notes regarding why the website was banned in their records?
The banning creates a lot of "What Ifs" and not enough facts, or public information. Regardless of which company or size of company that exists, google does or does not provide the answers to why a website is banned?
Not many can answer these questions with full explanations or answers it seems, which leaves anyone guessing. Some sort of answers to the public should be a priority instead of working on new "features".
Its just a matter of time before this issue becomes public, noone really knows that this problem exists.
If the wrong company gets banned with no reasons, it may have a large impact. Thats usually how changes get made, someone has to bark loud enough.
As I stated above, I would simply guess
Please don't - we try to be more professional here than that...
DerekH
What if you feel your website does abide by the rules and regulations, and is banned with no reason?
Rather than talk in airy-fairy generalisms, if you are still harping on about the site I can deduce from your profile, it's still got 15 HTML errors on the homepage, and 88 errors on the one other page I tried.
I think you need to qualify "for no reason" in the above, if the site that seems to irk you is going to stay unmodified.
Sorry - we're all trying to help here, and you ignore everything we say. Yes you might feel your site is banned for no reason, but we've given you reasons and you won't even consider them.
What sort of help did you expect from this forum?
DerekH
As I stated above, I would simply guess there would be notes regarding why the website was banned in their records?
So cdnmarket, do you actually have proof that Googlebot leaves little postit notes lying around the 'Plex with reasons for why each site is 'banned'?
Can I give you yet another tip?
Your page was manually removed from our index, because it did not conform with the quality standards necessary to assign accurate PageRank. We will not comment on the individual reasons a page was removed and we do not offer an exhaustive list of practices that can cause removal. However, certain actions such as cloaking, writing text that can be seen by search engines but not by users, or setting up pages/links with the sole purpose of fooling search engines may result in permanent removal from our index. If you think your site may fall into this category, you might try 'cleaning up' the page and sending a re-inclusion request to help@google.com. We do not make any guarantees about if or when we will re-include your site.
[google.com.au...]
Is there any particular aspect of this paragraph which requires any further explanation?
cdnmarket, are you truly telling us that you have no idea why it was banned? No cloaking, no hidden text, no dodgy linking, no doorway pages, no nothing that would cause it? So far through this thread, you've mostly avoided talking about why you might be banned, just the unjustness of it. Let's get down to the nitty-gritty... are you sure your site is squeaky clean? If GoogleGuy were to suddenly appear and offer to have a look at it, would he be as baffled as you claim to be, as to why it disappeared entirely?
<edit>fixed typo</edit>
The html code is all good and was good when it was removed
Then I apologise to those on this forum for my wasting bandwidth.
The site I was led to believe was the site in question has, 20 minutes ago, failed the W3C validation *again*. I can only assume that cdnmarket is not talking about the same site I was led to believe he was.
Rather than be called a liar by cdnmarket, I'll assume that he's got another site that's banned but that has perfectly good HTML code.
Sorry everyone for the obfuscation.
DerekH
no idea
Apparently. So far, there have been over 150 posts in the 2 separate threads cdnmarket has started on this issue - and still no idea.....
[edited by: Chris_D at 1:56 pm (utc) on Dec. 14, 2004]
If you actually listened and accepted that other people know more about this than you do, your problems would have been fixed by now. Then your re-inclusion in the google db would be imminent. But you choose not to listen and learn.
Why? What is your real motive?
Under certain search criteria in other search engines we appear ontop of google.
