Site Ban by Google Please Help

Well I can claim ingnorance..lol..when I first contacted this seo it was to seo the website..he reccomended we buy links that it would help produce higher ranking in a shorter amount of time. He said this is what he did with his website and it was ranked very well. This was part of the criteria for me choosing him because of his rankings in the SEs.

So since I am no expert I followed his advise. Until 3 months ago I didnt even know you could buy links or what allin anchor was or anything else.

 

.. and just to add what Shawn said, if this is your livelyhood, its your responsibility to ensure that you protect it by looking into any service that someone else might provide that would have an impact on your business... no matter how good of service they provide.

I'd look at some of your link partners, see if any of the other websites that are linked on it are in the same position as you, and like shawn said, get rid of some of the sponsored links, and you never know.

Darren

 

I know that none of the other link partners are in that position. It was only Seo Guys 2 real estate clients. There are common factors between realtor 1 and realtor 2 websites. I will just have to wait till google responds. I gave them a detailed history of the website.

 

In my experience Wayne, you may have a very long wait for any answer from Google, and even then it may be only a one liner like:

Your site has/has not been penalized.

There seems to be nothing wrong with your site, there is a history of bulk link buying, but only the two sites are affected.

I am not entirely convinced that it is a penalty for link buying since:

• Two sites were affected in identical ways
  
• Your pages were removed from both Google and Yahoo at the same time, leaving only some forum pages
  
• Your PR and backlinks remain unchanged
  
• Last Sunday you had only 7 pages indexed in Yahoo, all of them forum pages, today you have 101 pages indexed in Yahoo, with a mixture of both forum and regular pages.
  
• Today you rank #18 in Yahoo for atlanta real estate, even though only some of your pages are indexed

This looks to me like there was some kind of glitch that caused pages to be removed from Google and Yahoo, but they are now finding thier way back in Yahoo. If the pages were dropped from both Google and Yahoo at the same time it seems logical that it was for the same reason and that reason seems to have been corrected.

The only caveat is that it seems like there has been an email to Google telling them about the link buying, and that might create problems in and of itself.

 

I can say I feel it is based on part from a statement google made.

Lets start it this way. As stated there are common factors between myself and the other Seo Guys real estate client. Since we both were clients and we both got penalized..the problems is associated with one of those factors.

Common Factor Layouts.

A= Realtor #1 in real estate linking group

B=Realtor # 2 in real estate linking group

C= Realtor #3 in real estate linking group

D= Seo Guy Client in real estate linking group

E= Seo Guy Client in real estate linking group

Ok now A,B,C,D,E all have themed sitewide links to eachother with no other common factors other then the websites being themed and belonging to real estate agents.

D and E both use seo guy to purchase links from and handle the seo. We both have links back to seo guys website and real estate forum.

Now the common factors that both D and E have in common are.

1. We purchase links from seo guy. examples of those links that both D and E have together that were purchased from seo guy.

www.arizonatools.com/catalog/browse/2288-4089/ this website has sitewide links to both D and E

www.online-education.info/sitemap.php
This website has both sitewide to both D and E

www.web-design.seo-guy.com both D and E are or was on this page

http://www.oaklandtribune.com/

This group of newspapers did have both D and E on them which these groups of newspapers are owned by the same company and crosslink together.

http://www.realestatewebmasters.com Both D and E was on homepage and several others but also recieved backlinks from post made.

So I believe that google does penalize or ban for something that is trying to manipulate there serps. Here is an excerpt from google.

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312504105564/ds1a.htm#toc16167_4



There is an ongoing and increasing effort by “index spammers” to develop ways to manipulate our web search results. For example, because our web search technology ranks a web page’s relevance based in part on the importance of the web sites that link to it, people have attempted to link a group of web sites together to manipulate web search results. We take this problem very seriously because providing relevant information to users is critical to our success. If our efforts to combat these and other types of index spamming are unsuccessful, our reputation for delivering relevant information could be diminished. This could result in a decline in user traffic, which would damage our business.

Text-Matching Techniques. Our technology employs text-matching techniques that compare search queries with the content of web pages to help determine relevance. Our text-based scoring techniques do far more than count the number of times a search term appears on a web page. For example, our technology determines the proximity of individual search terms to each other on a given web page, and prioritizes results that have the search terms near each other. Many other aspects of a page’s content are factored into the equation, as is the content of pages that link to the page in question. By combining query independent measures such as PageRank with our text-matching techniques, we are able to deliver search results that are relevant to what people are trying to find.


Text advertising is NOT against googles Tos but when it is done to try and manipulate the serps it is..All it takes is for someone to file a report and show just cause why it is meant to manipulate and google will take action as I believe they have in relation to websites D and E.

 

And I have never met one that says he/she does.

I tell people that I am an SEO expert. I don't know everything. I know a lot. Last month I got caught by Google on the one of my bragging rights sites I do SEO upon. 65% Traffic drop in one month. No changes on the site. 80% of search terms just plain gone.

1. Does that mean that everything that I did before was bad or wrong?
NO

2. Did I receive bad advice at some time?
NO

3. Did I go back to the same people that gave me advice before?
You betcha!

The SEO expert you have worked with in the past is the best person to help you, because he knows your site, knows your optimization strategies.

Optimization is not a ONE TIME ACTIVITY. It is always changing. And part of an SEOs job is to try to keep up with the changes. However we all get caught on the bleeding edge at times. I will bet that none of the SEOs on this board can say that they never gave advice or implemented a change that did not backfire (or get changed for the worse) at least once.

I know that your SEO is making a deatiled analysis of your site (no matter if you are paying him or not) to figure out what advice he gave you backfired. He (like us) need to figure out those details so he does not give that advice again. He will probably disconver a new Google Rule.

Don't blame the SEO for pushing the bleeding edge, you blame an SEO for using blackhat SEO, but so far I have seen no blackhat SEO mentioned for your site.

 

1) I don't think your banned because you have page rank and backlinks and your indexed.
2) You can be found by searching for the following phrase:
"the most trusted name in Real Estate in the Greater Metro Atlanta Area"
Thus you are definately not banned.
3) Many people have reported being "sandboxed" after doing especially agressive link exchanges.
4) Google rarely "bans" sites by hand as they prefer a more algo approach and I doubt that you would be one of their "biggest" offenders.
5) You should NOT claim that SEO Guy is responsible for getting you banned when he is not because you are not banned.
6) No one understands "the sandbox" effect but I would be willing to wager that you are in it.
7) Your domain is not older than March 2004 which makes you a prime candidate for the Sandbox.
8) BAD NEWS - Nothing you can do to get out of it except wait.
9) If possible, you may want to set up a hompage at http://www.realtor.com as this page http://www.realtor.com/Atlanta/nbregion.asp?poe=realtor is already listed in the top 10 for your keywords.
10) If I had a problem with your service, I would never make accusations without being sure I knew what I was talking about, especially if it concerned real estate which I know nothing about. I would advise (which is also free) for you to adopt the same philosophy with regard to SEO. Especially since by your own admission you nothing about it, and since you are obviously upsetting the people who can help you the most by accussing one of the most respected names in the indutry (at least as far as the forums that you post in).

I hope this will help your situation. I can relate and it is no fun especially when you feel like you paid for a service designed to prevent this unintended consequence. The only thing I can say is that SEO Guy should have warned you about the possible ramifications of sitewide links which have been speculated for some time now. However, on the flip side it is also common practice in the industry so there is an understandable grey area.

Last thing I would recommend (for free is that you not rely in SEO as your primary lead generation stream as it will NEVER stay consistent. That doesn't mean it can't be cost effective but there aren't many successful professinal gamblers. Hope that helps.

 

Google has been dropping pages and then picking them back up like crazy. But I have to say that I am with New computer here that if your running a cross linking thing across a set of sites, then your heading into dangerous waters. be more selective, only cross link between pages that are on topic to each other and then with some decent anchor text that is relevant to the pages, and you should do well from it. Cross linking a group of sites, site wide is really not a good idea, especially if you have the same anchor text on all the links.

 

this should be read by anyone before buying links - it should also be read by anyone who wants to post about how his site dropped

 

lol do u get banned for having sitewide links ???

 

You know this thread is almost 2 years old, they did things differently way back then

 

can sitewides hurt you?

Do a search for googlebowling

 

here is something i would like to ask : would sitewide links to low or no pr site effect my pagerank or google search ??

 

If once your site is banned by google then you can not use same again.
If you try again, your site will automatically banned by google after few days.
You can try to set new domain name with new account.

 

Check if your site is banned by Google

http://www.selfseo.com/google_ban_tool.php

you can easily find out if your site was banned by Google.

 

How do you find out how many backlinks your site has?

 

You must have done activities which are banned by google. Try to Re Index your website by searching on google

 

I can find nothing in your robots.txt to stop the spidering of your pages.

 

Search engine optimization is one of the most helpful SEO experts that I have come across on any SEO forums and I think you should really be having these discussions with SEO Guy direct rather than having this discussion in a forum.