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We have gone over everything with a fine toothed comb, you guys know the drill. But in anticipation that we have been banned:
#1. Can a person confirm whether they have been banned?
#2. Can we find out what we did specifically to get banned?
#3. If we are banned what are the steps to get unbanned.
#4. If we know we did no spamming, how can we protest the ban?
#5. Should we prepare to go to another domain name and start over? Is that a quicker approach.
#6. (My husband asked me to ask this, although I know the answer, is there a number to call? for the sake of my marriage I had to ask
Thanks in advance for all your help, great forum, Best place to get information.
2. They are not likely tell you specifically even if you did get a response.
Have you used automated position reporting software?
Is there more than one site up with duplicate content?
3. If people have been unbanned I can't recall recently. Often times it's nothing more than a technical glitch on Google's part, a network issue or a server down. Or a site can time out because of server load with a bad host and a crammed-full box the site is hosted on, and be out of the game for a month, it's happened to me.
4. You cannot protest. People generally come here and get sympathy and compassionate peer support and/or take out their anger by blaming their competitors for their misfortune and snitching.
5. If conversions and reciprocal linkage are generally good, give it a month or two. Set up an AdWords account and start picking a new domain name just in case.
6. There is no known phone number to call.
>>for the sake of my marriage I had to ask
Oh, really? Are you his wife or his employee?
Now, that is not a topic we cover here in the Google News forum. If he's your employer, then our Professional Webmasters Business Issues forum would be the place for that. Otherwise, we would most likely be able to give you much invaluable advice on how to deal with that man over in Foo. :)
Well, I am not sure what that means. We have used bcentral for the last year. Is that a problem? Bcentral was a tool I used a year ago when I first took on the challenge, pre webmasterworld.com. I never have stop the accounts cause we spent good money on it.
Can you give an example of auto postion reporting software?
Nope, my husband is a pharmacist/lawyer - only deals in logic, can you imagine him in the SEO world?
#1. when you are gone for 6 mths = true ban
remember lots of sites drop in and out and you can never be sure until you wait a couple of updates.
#2. No, google may admit you did something bad but will never tell you what it is
#3. get rid of anything that is a nono (against their TOS) if it is all gone you may get back in. I was told to clean the site and then wait 6 mths and then maybe (using one of the email addresses on their site)
#4. you can't, if you truly did nothing wrong then it will come back, just be patient
#5. always good to have a backup plan
#6. no number, the rest Marcia can help you with ;)
any software that queries google using your keywords to find out what position you are in.
not wanting to point fingers
She apologetically annoys me every week by sending me the report she gets from bCentral for her search engine positions.
The last report she sent, this past week, had no results, saying that their was a "problem" and they hoped it would be resolved soon. They've never had Google included anyway, but what is the point of checking weekly? I don't know how often their submissions are done, but I personally see no point to that either.
If it's a different site, sorry.
Morgan
Initally they said that my site had "been blocked because it did not meet the quality standards needed to assign accurate Pagerank" and then went on to list cloaking, invisible text and link farming as possible reasons for "permanent removal". I felt like I was being treated like a criminal. So I wrote another email back protesting my innocence. They did check into it futher, and then wrote back that a bug in their process caused my site to be deleted from their index by accident and that one of their developers spotted the problem and fixed it.
If I had not written to them, I don't know if they would have ever known about the problem and that site may have been permanently banned.
Just to emphasize what Morgan (not me) said above, Google won't list your site unless you have at least one good incoming link from another site that they already know about. Hidden links are not so good. The mailto: link probably won't count at all.
One thing you can do to guarantee very good coverage in all the major search engines is to get your site listed in the Open Directoy Project (ODP) over at [dmoz.org...] . Listings are free, but your site must have something that, in their opinion, is worth offering. Quality site content is key.
A listing in ODP will eventually propagate through all the inter-search-engine deals and alliances to reach all of the important search engines.
A grey toolbar is not a "banned" indicator, it's a "We (Google) don't know" indicator. An all-white toolbar after several Google update cycles is possibly a "banned" indicator (Some here report that a fractional PageRank, i.e. 0.4, might also give a white bar that doesn't indicate a ban).
Also, in case it hasn't been mentioned yet here, be aware that your site may pop in and out of Google for the first month that it is listed. Then, if all is well, it will take up a relatively solid position in their results.
Good luck with it!
Jim
[edited by: WebGuerrilla at 5:21 pm (utc) on Sep. 19, 2002]
[edit reason] removed search url [/edit]
Good lesson learned. Thanks so much.
Does anyone sleep on this forum. Goodnight
