Banned sites = time to fight back!

RX for banned sites

[mayor]

Looks like a lot of folks get their sites banned from Alta Vista. Some deserve it, and some don't. AV is quite willing to trash your site even if you play by the rules. Their spam filters are cranked up so high everyone is at risk.

Let's run a thread on how to recover AV traffic after your site has been banned. From reading other threads, I kind of doubt writing to them is the answer, unless you're ready to make your site so squeaky clean no one will send you traffic.

I was very meticulous to try to not be a spammer but my site appears to have been recently banned by AV, after being well indexed for over a year. So I'll start by asking if it works to move your pages from a banned site over to an unbanned site, perhaps with a little tweaking of the content?

[Air]

I am always curious in these cases, what makes you think you are banned?

[Machiavelli]

I can't speak for mayor, but I have been banned from submitting, which is strange, although none of my sites have been dropped. I keep getting an message saying that they could not connect to my host at that time, although I have had no problems getting my site via various proxies, nor have other of my friends from around the globe. In other words, they are fibbing I think, and are banning a c-class range of ip addresses (ie xxx.xxx.xxx.*) from submitting.
Bother.

[mayor]

Air, I think I've been banned because my AV traffic dropped over a period of a couple weeks from a couple hundred visitors a day, with about 200 catalog pages, to 0. At the same time, the pages reported registered at Alta Vista dropped from about 200 down to 1 (the home page). I did try re-submitting a few but that didn't work.

I run a virtual shopping mall with affiliate programs, and make catalog pages optimized for various product offerings. Every page is manually created to be custom for the product and includes some content description of the products along with links to the affiliate merchant. I can only guess that AV cranked their spam filters up so high that these were flagged as doorway pages, which I understand they don't like.

I've always been careful not to spam, so that only one page shows up on the results for a given keyword. So as far as I'm concerned, I've played by the rules as much as possible but still been banned. So, I'm fed up and ready to fight back.

[tigger]

Mayor

I have a site that's been banned now for about 6 mths due to "inapropriate keywords" which was not the case. I sent AV another E-mail asking them to look at the keywords and explain their reasoning, as all the keywords where apropriate to the site.

Since then I've sent over 20 e-mails to various departments asking them (very politely) to look into this, the only reply to date is the standard reply e-mail.

Not very impressed :(

[Air]

mayor,

When the page that is still in the index is returned does it have a "More pages from this site" link (you may have to adjust your options at AV to see it). If it does, and when you click on it your other pages are displayed, then you aren't banned, they've rolled up the results to prevent all of the pages from showing up in search results. If that is the case, it doesn't help, I know, but they have been doing that for a while now.

[mayor]

Thanks for the advice, Air, but no, the other pages are not rolled up with the home page, and I do have the option turned to show if they are.

[Air]

It does look like they dropped the pages then, only AV can tell you why. While it works to move to another domain, if you don't find out what the objection was to those pages they'll just get turfed again.

Try submitting a page from that domain with the meta tag "noindex", if AV accepts the page then likely your domain is banned, if they reject it because of the "noindex" then they dropped the pages for some reason but did not ban the domain. Haven't tried this little test for a few months or so, but it used to be a pretty good indicator.

[mayor]

Thanks for the advice, Air. I really have no good clue why my site disappeared from their index, and it's really irrelevant whether it was dropped or whether it was banned. The traffic stopped, that's the bottom line, and they aren't taking it back into their index.

But it was ok for a long time. So I'll gamble that if I copy the pages to another site, or maybe split them among two different new sites, they'll stick for a while. I will change the keyword densities, however, so these new pages don't show up on the same results pages as the old pages on the other search engines, which I understand could get me in trouble with them.

After all, when you have zero traffic, what's there to loose by bringing out the heavy artillary?

[jilly]

One of our sites was banned from AV in the big ban of this past summer. We have tried to get back in to no avail. We did not spam and the listings had been in the directory for over 2 years if not longer without any problems. They never returned an email or a phone call. I gave up actually but it still pisses me off when I see the huge amount of spam in the database and I can't even get my diddly little site back in.

Any advice is more than welcome!!

[tigger]

jilly.

glad to see I'm not the only one, at least you can "try" to speak to them on the phone, I've now sent so many e-mails to them that I've given up, my client now has got another domain and the sites doing quite well on AV. ;)

What ever happend to service !!! I think it must have gone out the window with windows 3.1