Formally banned or blocked by Google?

How were you reinstated? Is there hope for me and and others?

[wellnesscafe]

If you experienced being banned or blocked or blacklisted by google and were eventually reinstated please share your success story with those of us still trapped in the dark tunnel of confusion and ignorance. Let us see the light at the end of that tunnel. Give us a glimpse of hope.

1. How long did it take for your site to show up in google again?

2. Did your site get its former ranking back? Did all the pages got a ranking or only the home page?

3. Did you do anything specific? (IE emailed google, etc.)

4. Where you banned? Blocked? other? And Why?

Any feedback to shed the light and give us hope would be most greatly appreciated.

[jakegotmail]

You are pretty much screwed. google enjoys shafting web site owners, even if you didn't know what was wrong with your site. It happened to us. Some SEO put in a bunch of hidden links.

Also, don't even bother sending them mail, they don't respond and they probably won't even read it...

Good luck!

[rfgdxm1]

Abandon all hope ye who have been cast into the void by Google. Usually it is best to just throw away the domain immediately, and start over. What exactly were the sins against Google that you committed? You could always try writing Google apologizing for your transgression, and claim they were due to a temporary demonic possession or such, which has been cured by exorcism. However, odds of mercy by the Google gods is small, and thus why abandoning the domain pronto is best.

Just one point. Are you *sure* your site got the Google Death Penalty, and that perhaps the server wasn't down, etc.?

[NFFC]

>It happened to us. Some SEO put in a bunch of hidden links.

Lost me, do you mean on your site?

[wellnesscafe]

I did email google to ask what happened and got this reply:
"Your page has been blocked from our index because it does not meet the quality standards necessary to assign accurate PageRank. We cannot comment on the individual reasons your page was removed. However, certain actions such as cloaking, writing text in such a way that it 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. Please read our webmaster guidelines at [google.com...] for more information."

I have affiliation with several merchants and I have been cloaking some of these merchant's links to protect my interest. To prevent google to index my cloaked files, I have just started using the robots.txt file with the following command: User-agent: * Disallow: /a/
(/a/ is the directory where I have all the cloaked files). I hope this robots.txt file satisfy google.

There are different type of cloaking. Someone wrote that SE cloaking is basically presenting Googlebot with a different page than other users will see. That is not what I do with cloaking.

I have also removed all hidden dots which I was using to position my images and text. I had some keywords relevant to the content of my entire site listed in visible font in my index file. I removed them too.

The information on my site pertains to holistic health and I can't help it if I have repeated keywords in a page such as "vaccines" or "health" etc.

I'm concerned that google may interprets these keywords are spamming. What is one to do in this case? This is maddening.

Also in each file I have about 100 links to internal files in the side column to make my site as user friendly as possible. Does google consider this spamming too?

I'm considering getting a new domain name and IP, but unless I know precisely what google doesn't like about my site how am I to know what to do, and I'm concerned that my new site may be banned too.

[rfgdxm1]

Sounds to me like you need an honest SEO to figure out exactly what happened. Unfortunately, there are only 2 honest SEOs on the planet, and I hear at the moment both are on vacation. ;) What stands out to me is you wrote "I have affiliation with several merchants and I have been cloaking some of these merchant's links to protect my interest." Precisely WHY don't you want Googlebot to see this? I get this feeling you were engaging in some sort of shady linking practices, and you aren't confessing all of your sins here. The only specific sin that could get you the Google Death Penalty that you seem to have confessed to is "I had some keywords relevant to the content of my entire site listed in visible font in my index file." Doesn't matter if they are visible. If they are there for search engines only, that is enough to be forever banished from the blessings of Google.

As far as that "The information on my site pertains to holistic health and I can't help it if I have repeated keywords in a page such as "vaccines" or "health" etc.", this doesn't sound like enough to get the Google Death Penalty. So long as you have these in the form of reasonable presentation for human beings to read, this should be seen as being on the side of honest SEO.

[jomaxx]

>> I had some keywords relevant to the content of my entire site listed in visible font in my index file.

Did you mean "in visible" or "invisible"? You realize there are places online where people can see what Shirley's Wellness Cafe looked like last year, right? We can't give you correct advice unless you are straight with us.

[mfishy]

A lot of people ask the same question. Basically, if you are banned by Google, it is over. They are pretty much Draconian in their dealings with webmasters and bans.

Get a new domain and start over. You have more of a chance writing to the President of the United States and getting a response.

[rfgdxm1]

I dunno if the mods will delete that jomaxx, but I see that blatant keyword spam block at the bottom of the page as visible text at archive.org. Yep, this site was trying to cheat search engines big time. That likely is what got his site the Google Death Penalty. Throw away that domain, and start over.

[wellnesscafe]

rfgdxm1, I didn't get it. What blatant keyword spam block at the bottom of the page are you referring to?

[rfgdxm1]

Check you stickymail. If this archive.org snapshot of it is your site, that domain is toast.

[jomaxx]

I viewed the most recent cache in both Netscape and MSIE, and it's certainly not visible to me.

Not that I particularly care, except that I've spent a lot of time trying to help wellnesscafe in the many threads she's posted in on at least two websites. And not that Google cares, since THEY already KNOW why the site has been penalized.

[rfgdxm1]

jomaxx, check archive.org. I'll stickymail you the specific URL what she did that got her site the Google Death Penalty.

[wellnesscafe]

Yes, you are all quite right. That page in the archive.org is a couple year old I think. I have redesigned it numerous time since then and replaced these hidden keywords with grey font visible to my visitors. Nevertheless, I have only myself to blame for this. I had not read google's guideline then, and grey font or not, these are still keywords.

Actually I thought I had been banned because of my cloaked url or the hidden dots. But after reading the guideline, it dawned on my that the keywords in my index file had to be removed.

I have over 200 files with rich contents. I was stupid because I certainly didn't need those keywords in my index file to boost my ranking especially since all pages were always displayed on the top 10 search results.

There is no excuse for what I did. I have to pay a heavy duty price for negligence and ignorance.

I've learned that there is always a positive opportunity in every experience. I'll make the best out of this. This is also a lesson in humility.

I thank you all for helping me through this painful awakening journey.

One thing: how did you find that page in the archive.org? I did a search for my name but came up with nothing

[Night_Hawk]

Good luck wellnesscafe, Those guys are sharp, they know how to find your site by the smallest clue from your post.

What if you have a gray bar like wellnesscafe site but the SE list you site for certin keywords in the first page, and minty freshness visited the site and indexed new pages after getting the gray bar, does this mean the "server was down" when the deep crawl happend?

[wellnesscafe]

rfgdxm1,

I am mostly cloaking affiliate links from merchants who do not offer return days (some call it "Cookie Persistence" which indicates the number of days after a visitor clicks on an affiliate link for which the affiliate will still receive commissions). I do not do it to fool SE or visitors.

Many visitors are in a rush when they visit my affiliated merchants and return to the merchant's site via their bookmark/favorites to purchase or complete their purchase a few days or a few weeks later.

Cloaking links closes a nasty affiliate loophole which has caused me to loose a lot of commissions.

I am an inexperienced webmaster of my own site. I started at geocities years ago. I didn't know about frames until last week. I thought frames and cloaking were one and the same. I could have used frames with the same results.

Anyway, I discovered a little tiny program set up to just cloak affiliate link to prevent people to view the affiliate code. It also serves to close a nasty loophole in the "no return days"

I hope this clarifies the cloaking thing :)

[rfgdxm1]

>One thing: how did you find that page in the archive.org? I did a search for my name but came up with nothing

By knowing the name of your site, I was able to find the URL via a SE other than Google. Once I knew the URL, then just dig up the old copies in archive.org.

[fatpeter]

I did a search on your e-mail address at google and it came up. :)

[jakegotmail]

NFFC: Yes I was letting a SEO access to our sites, and they put in hidden links. We fired him (for other reasons in Oct.) and 12/26 we were booted out of google. I had our web guy (who started the week before) search the pages and figure out was going on and he explained he thought it was hidden links on our sites. Anyway, emailed google a pretty lengthy email on what the deal was... never heard back from them.

[jomaxx]

Yes, at the web archive you search by URL.

Just to clarify, there was no question of hunting down what site wellnesscafe was posting about. That's a kind of "outing" I usually would not do. The emails she posted were clearly addressed to "Shirley" and the website is "Shirley's Wellness Cafe", so there was really no mystery to solve. Plus she added the site to her profile in a certain other search engine discussion forum where she has been discussing this same matter.

[rfgdxm1]

As for the outing part jomaxx, as someone pointed out all that was needed to find the site was a search on her profile e-mail. Also, in this case "outing" is irrelevant. Her site has already got the Google Death Penalty. While it would be bad form to use this board to try and fink out another poster here, in her case it was already too late. In terms of Google, getting your URL banned is the worst case scenario. Things can't get worse for her.

[indigojo]

jeez wellnesscafe, if only you'd have made the text visible like this Jakob bloke you might of been ok
[webmasterworld.com...] :)

[wellnesscafe]

indigojo, actually the text was visible in grey font. The archived page where the text is not visible is two years old. I've made the text visible well over a year ago. I think that no keyword block is allowed at all, visible or not.