Did Site-Sift Get Whacked?

I have never seen that site until you posted it. qqsites dot com has clearly copied all of our content. We have sent an email to the administrator of that account demanding they remove all copyrighted pages ASAP. From first look it looks like some site in Asia.

As Shawn H. has clearly stated he submitted his site to that category himself. Macdesign- you should not accuse people unless you have all the facts.

Did we buy advertising from O'Reilly??? You bet we did! XML.com has tons of traffic take a look: Traffic Rank for xml.com 9,665 (from Alexa)

We could have bought much cheaper advertising for the purpose of "buying pagerank" if that was our goal. Our goal was to advertise on high traffic sites. Trust me when I say this.... we could have bought 6-7 PR8 links for the price we paid for one O'Reilly site. BTW, the O'Reilly sites have something like 300 links (internal and outgoing) per page. Do you really think if we were buying for pagerank we would buy a link with 300 links on it?

We also do lots of banner advertising but it's funny how nobody mentions this at all. Just about all the banner advertising that we have done does not pass pagerank. This has been done on numerous PR7 & PR6 websites/forums. How many other directories can say that? (without an affiliate program)

Again, we choose to advertise with O'Reilly for the traffic and it is disheartening to hear people assume otherwise. Our goal has been simple we are building a brand. To build a brand one must advertise.

Why did Site-Sift.com get banned??? At this point we can only speculate..... if and when I get an answer back from Google I will share that information.

 

I just want to say to smindsrt that whatever it was that made google did this, I appreciate your hounesty on this forum. I wish you good luck sorting things out with our friends at google.com.

But just to make sure: site-sift.com did NOT do any black-hat thingies?

 

Banned from Google adsense it seems

 

Who woulda thought

 

Is it any of your business? Who the F. are you?

 

What accusation? I never hesitate to make accusations if I have any to make.

1. I found several descriptions copied from DMOZ - that's just facts and is relevant to discussions about Google removing directories with DMOZ content.

2. The description for Digital Point Solutions just looked wrong, makes them look like an accounting company, maybe I should not have posted it, it was not relevant to the thread.

3. I found mirrored content on two sites.

That's all I said.

 

Sure sounds like one to me.

I would imagine that some webmasters submit the same descriptions to numerous directories. In fact I tend to do it with my sites. You can go to Dmoz, UTN, BOTW, SS, Goguides and numerous other directories and most of my sites have the same description.

For the record.... we have never copied DMOZ.

I think that Shawn knows how to describe his site better than anyone. BTW, just in case you missed someone else's post http://www.digitalpoint.com/products/

You found copyright violations. A site which blatantly copied our entire directory word for word. I guess the person doing the copying must of thought our site was good and wanted one for himself. lol

 

I have actually tryed many times to save a txt doc with my descriptions so I do not have to rewrite them each and everytime I submit somewhere....

Lots of my links have the same descriptions in many places, but not all....

So it looks like site-sift did get targeted directly by Google.... If I had to guess I'd say that Google probably personally reviewed the site and thought that it had a higher PR than it should naturally...

I guess someone there at Google has the authority to make a well rounded decision on the overall importance of a site and if they do not feel like allowing a site to continue holding such a high PR rating, they will just remove it rather than lower it....

I don't want to bash the site becasue I know just how much effort was put into that directory, but in a case like this it's really just a wake up call to all of us who own directories.....

Your time could be at any moment..... Make sure your directory is clean, unique, and as useful to the web as possible.... If someone at Google doesn't like the look of it, or if they think you are surviving on PR alone, they wont carry you to success...

 

Ofcourse it's none of my business, but there seems to be trend of directories getting whacked. Site sift has a lot of time and money inversted in it, and I think it is very concerning if some sites just get whiped out for no real reason other than 'too high pr'.

and smindsrt is a big boy, if he doesnt want to answer that question, he won't and does not need you to throw in one-liners.

and besides that, I happen to like the site sift directory and feel sorry for the webmasters.

 

I have to say that in the BULK of submissions we use the same title description keywords for directories. After all, if you write them properly then how can you have lots of different ones? I edit on a few directories, and can honestly say that I do not copy and paste. it is simple really, I look at the site, write the description and away to go.

The times I mention that the title is changed is when submitting to a specialist niche directory where deep links are accepted, so obviously the title and description would be different.

 

sorry to hear Stuart, I hope things get sorted out for ya!

 

SO sad to hear that. SITE-SIFT is one of my favorite directory and I wish it gets back to normal soon

 

hey, I'm totally on your side when it comes to advertising you bought - I don't know the price you paid but the site you were on gets tons of traffic. If I was working on/for a professional directory I would have done the same. My intent in starting this thread was just discussing and hopefully learning from waht happened, that's it.

Hopefully the big G responds and you guys can get back into business. Best of luck and please keep us informed.

 

Sorry if this is a dumb question - I'm not an SEO or anything, but the comments you guys are making implies that the only reason the directory is in existence is to get a high Google ranking and, since it no longer has a high ranking, the whole thing is somehow out of business...

If the directory is good, then it is good, no matter how well or poorly it ranks in Google, no?

Unless, of course, the directory was built solely to get good rankings in Google. If that was the case, maybe that's why Google dropped it (along with other directories which it perceives to be doing the same thing)....

So which is it - is it a good, functioning directory, or is it in existence only to get good G rankings?

 

I actually have had quite a few dealings with the owner and can say that they wanted it ranked good everywhere, not just Google. Who doesnt want to rank well everywhere?

The thing is, being banned from Google hurts you in more ways than one.

 

Directories are being scrutinized by Google differently it seems then other websites. A reply I received a few months ago from Google clearly stated that Directories can not buy or sell page rank. The average directory is a PR 5 or 6. Anything above that is apparently going to be closely scrutinized by Google and manually removed if found to be in any way not keeping with their standards for a directory.

I strongly feel this is an unfair trade practice and directory operators should not have to look over their shoulder every time they purchase advertising to bring traffic to a directory, or sell advertising and worry about uncle Google looking.

 

Especially when the PR is assigned to sites BY GOOGLE!

 

I personally don’t care about page rank and the majority of my users and submitters don’t know what it is or have the Google Tool Bar on their computer. The page rank hounds are a pain in the neck. I was running directories long before the page ranking system and we somehow survived.

 

Why don't I believe that?

 

high PR (PR7 and PR8) directories have the highest risk of being whacked than any other sites. No mater what the intention of the directory owners is - ads for traffic etc. As long as you want to make money from the directory, the directory is in trouble - the reason many want to pay for a listing in high PR directories is for PR.

UTN could be next on Google's list. This has nothing to do with duplicate content or quality of the diretories. It does tell one thing that PR is still very important for Google's ranking algorithm.