First off I should say I have some sites that are heavily SEO'd, and this is not one of them. I completely and intentionally ignored SEO for this site. Nothing, not even the page titles, is optimized on the site itself, and I didn't do any link exchanges or anything else. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. I wanted to build a quality site and see if word spreads by word of mouth and eventually gets me a good ranking naturally. Plus this was a fun project and, frankly, I find SEO rather tiring. The thing is, it seems that, despite no SEO whatsoever, I have been banned by Google. At first I thought it was the sandbox. But 14 months is a bit long for the sandbox. (Right?) So how do I know I was banned? Try entering the title of my site in Google and you get nothing but lots of sites which mention my site, whereas in Yahoo! praise the Lord my site is No. 1 as it darn well should be. I think this pretty well defines a state of penalization, unless it is the sandbox, but it can't be the sandbox because it's been like this since September 2005! I just don't get it. I would understand a low ranking for keywords (such as "vocabulary learning" etc), but a ban??? Why? How do you get banned for doing exactly zero SEO? Anyone care to take a guess why this might have happened? Nick P.S. My other sites do well in G and haven't been banned. And even with my heavily SEO'd ones, I only use WH.
I had the same issue, I submitted a reinclusion to Google asking if the site had been banned before (I bought it when it was expired). Am currently waiting for their reply. Would be worthwhile doing the same.
Its not banned by google http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=site:albis.vetsin.com&btnG=Search&meta= they just don't rate it very high
Ah yes, in your case there is that possibility. But as you can see my site is on a subdomain of my company's domain that nobody has ever owned so that can't be it. P.S. Try poking around at the Wayback Machine to see what's been on your site before.
I agree that they don't rate it high, and I do know that G do have indexed all my pages, which is great. But if I'm not banned then why would a search for the exact title of my site not be found within the top 100 SERPs? Makes no sense. There are no other sites which have exactly the same title, and I'm not even in the SERPs at all. Plus even if you search for my domain name, you STILL don't get at my site on G. No, this is definitely a ban of some sort.
No this is definately not a ban. when you get banned your whole site disapears, trust me its possible that you picked up a penalty or tripped a filter.
We are getting into semantics. I said "ban of some sort". Penalty. Whatever we call it, the fact remains that Google is not treating my site the way it should. Far from it! And I still have no idea why. "Tripped a filter", you say? What exactly could I have tripped? If you know, please do tell. That's why I am posting. That's why I am here at this forum right now instead of working. I am trying to figure out what is wrong with my zero-SEO harmless little fun project that caused G to flag it as an evil site not deserving of any exposure to the light of day.
If you site got no page title , what do you expect google to list your site under ? , try just to make that page title and see what happens
Huh? Of course my site has a page title. It's just not SEO'd. It contains the name of the site and a slogan, instead of your usual dose of keywords. My whole point is that searching for my site's title doesn't put my site in the number 1 spot in the SERPs, or anywhere for that matter. Isn't there anyone in this forum who knows more SEO than me?