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E-book InformationBanned By Google And Back Again.
by:
T. O' Donnell
The date: Twenty-ninth Gregorian calendar month
2005. The time: early morning. I got out of bed and discharged up my PC. Opened my browser to check my site. Had a look at the third-party Google toolbar plugin (http://toolbar.google.com/) on aforesaid browser (FireFox). It showed grey.
Ice formed in my stomach. I opened my wired
version of Computer network Explorer: my PageRank was 0. By now I was frantic. I went to http://www.google.com and typewritten in 'site:www.tigertom.com': no pages listed. I did this for two another satellite sites of mine: ditto.
What had happened?
TigerTom.Com (http://www.tigertom.com) had been prohibited by Google. I went to the WebmasterWorld forum (http://www.webmasterworld.com), and found out the awful truth. Google was doing one of its periodic updates of its algorithm, and had filtered out my sites completely.
Further research there, and a bit of soul-searching, discovered why. I had too galore pseudo-directory pages with auto-generated external links. Snippets from search engine results were used as descriptions of aforesaid links. Aforesaid links were run although a airt script. These are hallmarks of pseudo-directories and 'AdSense scraper'* sites. Google is reportedly trying to filter these from its 'SERPs'**. I say reportedly, because Google doesn't announce these purges. They are inferred.
To compound my sins, these pages were besides effectively door pages†.
The theory was that legitimate sites had been hit as 'collateral damage'. I say theory, in that Google seldom
comments on individual cases. It won't tell you exactly why your site was banned. I guess this is for reasons of time, and to give no clues to spammers.
In my case the ban was even
for my two satellite sites; piece not looking like spam, they were effectively door sites.
My main site was different. It had offensive pages, but was mostly a diverse labour of seven years; a personal site on steroids.
Google bans sites algorithmically: a site that fits their 'spammer' profile gets born
via software system from their index automatically. Real spammers shrug their shoulders and come on; honest webmasters write emails beggary for mercy.
Like me.
I did several searching via Google, to find out how to do a re-inclusion request. Here's how:
1. First, you check your site is truly gone, by going to http://www.google.com, typewriting 'site:www.yourdomain.com' without the apostrophes. If it returns no pages at all ...
2. You check Google's webmaster guidelines at http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html. These are not actually guidelines; you should treat them as iron-clad rules.
3. You finish the offensive content from being web-accessible, permanently.
If you're familiar with Apache web-server mod_rewrite you can:
- Send a 410 'Gone' response to requests for the offensive pages, or
- CHMOD them to 600, which wish return a 403 'Forbidden' response, or
- Come them to a several directory if you need to keep them, or
- Simply delete them.
Don't try to be clever. Simply get rid of them.
4. You go to http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py, tick the relevant boxes, and type 'Re-inclusion request' in the subject box of the form.
4a. You add the complete URL of your site i.e. http://www.naughtydomain.com,
4b. You state that you have see the webmaster guidelines above,
4c. You admit what you did wrong; simply, succinctly, with no carping or special pleading.
Don't try to be clever. Don't argue. Don't lie. Don't waffle.
Google has cached copies of your site. Once
an engineer checks your site, he'll look for the offensive content, and compare it against their cache. He'll spend just about two minutes on it; don't give him a reason to continue to exclude you.
5. You ask for re-inclusion.
6. You wait.
In my case, it took just about a week; a long, unpleasant, fretful week. I sent follow up emails expression what I was doing, and a fax, and I was going to write letters if that didn't work. That was probably excessive. Once you have a ticket number, that's all that should be necessary.
They emailed a standard reply expression "the problem had been passed to their engineers". That's good. I understand they send no reply to spammers.
A week later my site was back in. Lesson learnt. To do sure I'm not so vulnerable again, I'm rending my content to several sites, on the principle of 'best not to have all your eggs in one basket'.
Have I learnt thing
from this? Yes. Have much than one site as your 'money-maker'. Spend less time on search engine optimization and much on traditional marketing. Come up with a unique merchandising proposition that compels folk to link to your site. Easy(!)
Simply just about the author:
T. O' Donnell (http://www.ttfreeware.co.uk/) is an ecommerce adviser and oldster living in London, UK. His latest project is an ebook on acquiring a loan in the UK (http://www.tigertom.com/personal-loans-uk.shtml). His web log can be see at http://www.ttblog.co.uk/
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