On Aug 29th we were delisted for high rankings in Google but all pages still are indexed but show up 1000+ searches down. It has now been almost 2 months and our rankings have not returned. We went from 2000 visits a day, down to 150 a day. This has led to us firing 2 employees because of the sales the site generated paid their wages. The site was banned because we created about 10 subsites. On the footer of the subsites was a sitewide link to our mother site. This must have triggered Google to realize that we were unnaturally linking our main site. We have since removed the links and replaced them with Java links so that they don't pass any link value to the main site. We have also admitted our fault and asked for manual reconsideration. My Question is this...... How long are people reporting until a site returns? 1 month? 6 months? And how does it return? back to normal?
in my case, it lasted 1year. I submitted 3 reconsideration requests, but there was no answer to any of them.
were the sites linking-in related to the main site? I have seen many sites following the same strategy without any problems , may be a competitor specially reported you
Do you really think that in order to bring a site down in Google that all you have to do is create ten subsites and then link them all to one site? Imagine how much fun we could all have if this were really true...
Ditto. Yes, please explain: were these 'subsites' as subdomains, directories below root or wholly separate domains? Maybe the 'duplicate content' thing bit you as well? Good luck to you, your business, and the employees! I really hope you don't have to wait a whole year. John
I doubt it was the subdomains, there are many legitimate reasons for this. Take craigslist for example. all their regions are on subdomains. i however am going through something similair. i submitted a reinclusion request, it took 3 days to get a reply. It was generic, said that my request had been processed. Google will of course never tell you if it was approved or not. As of now I barely show anythign in google. I have read it takes anywhere from 3 days to 3 years for reconsideration. I am still waiting.... its been a week since the reply.
One of my main sites got penalized on Sept. 5th. Was receiving about the same amount of traffic as you and now I'm getting nothing. My income is gone too. I haven't done anything shady, so I'm kind of confused. I did add a sub-domain, whitelabel of a DVD store.. But I didn`t think GOogle would be dumb enough to penalize me for something like that.. I`was trying to make my site more useful to the surfers. Anyway, I`ve since deleted the sub-domain but still not getting any love from G. What a joke
It sounds like your site received a penalty, that is a far way from being totally delisted. If you were delisted, you would not show up at all. What you did was create a link building scheme. Delete all of the linking pages and wait for your rankings to return.
You should use nofollow tags in Java links too as nowadays, Google can read links generated by Javascripts Reconsideration requests can take a random amount of time to get process. You can imagine the people who submit a reconsideration requests. Do you think that there is some duplicate content somewhere in your site?
I partially agree with this--probably not subdomains. (Still don't know for sure though.) But, to me, craigslist isn't a good example at all. craigslist, like all the wiki sites, IMDb, (Amazon) .edu(s), etc. are all on the big G's goody-goody 'play nice' list, and would never get punished. Even if they resorted (no reason) to using black hat techniques, Google would just adapt.
Come on guys.... We are not amateurs. We have been doing SEO for 10 years and do about $2 Million a year in retained sales with major companies through the USA and Canada. I am looking for intelligent posts. We know what we did wrong. we do not need to hear stuff like "you did a link farm, your site is still indexed just penalized" We know this stuff already. We areeeeeee, trying to help everyone by relaying our experience. 2 months being penalized for creating sub sites. For the amateurs in the room here is an example. Main site of 4 years ranking #1 for widgets. "widgetstore.com" We went and built... bluewidgetstore.com and gave sitewide links to the main site. X10, thus getting the mother site banned. Yes we did separate IPs. Yes we did unique Whois. So Puhhhleasssseee.... give us intelligent conversation on when a site might be relisted. Is there another forum on the web for advanced internet marketing?
Your site was not delisted - it received an penalty. There is a big difference there. I would think its going to be at least 4 weeks before the penalty is removed. Google seems to do a deep crawl every 2 weeks. Its going to take at least 2 deep crawls before the links start to get removed from googles index. If you did a link building scheme, then its going to take google removing most of those links before your site recovers. But regardless of what you do, I would say at least 2 deep crawls by google, so that is at least 4 - 6 weeks before google picks up that those links are no longer there.
In my experience results start to slowly improve after a couple of months - so long as you have removed all the links. Even after a year some of my sites have still not recovered.
What a bunch of crap! We have the same problem, it has been a problem since March/April Google shows no sign of recovery for things like this! Despite reconsideration requests. We get millions of pageviews a month. solarpanelsdirect: WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG !!!!! ARRRHHHHHHHH Craigslist has tons of sites that are not subdomains .co.uk .de .fr etc... and they all interlink F....U Google for allowing this but penalizing others then telling people in your youtube videos that its the opposite thing! I have legit reasons for my sites and they are not link farms! Seobiznezz I would not count on getting you sites back unless we all start a big debate pointing out incorrect information from Matt Cutts and Greg Grothaus. If we prove this then we can get some focus on the subject and get it corrected!
Seobiznezz, I had to read this a few times to understand what was going on. So you're saying you created 10 subsites with a sitewide link (a link on every page) going to your mother site? That probably was what did it. Google is now penalizing for any form of unnatural linking that can be interpreted as an attempt to manipulate the SERP's. They also just recently announced that they can read javascript links. My advice, remove the links entirely and see what happens. If you feel luck just keep one link on the homepage of each subsite. Let me know what happens.
Subdomains pointing to the main domain do not invoke any penalty from Gooogle. Just search for seobook in google and you will see all subdomains of seobook.com - on the first position. All these subdomains as well as their main domain rank well in Google for competitive keywords.
So all we need to do to improve our rankings is create lots of sitewide links to our competitors? Surely Google would not have such a gaping flaw in it's system? Could it be something on the page Google didn't like? Maybe it worked before but Google made an change and it tripped something? Is it the site in your signature? Noticed that you're linking out to this site in your footer? http://www.panthermeds.com/ HTML: Maybe Google doesn't like this? Would be nice if you could post what you change and when you see a return.