What would you do: wait for Google to lift ban or change domain name?

So I wanted to develop a news website and I registered this domain name: WorldGala.com. On April 1st I've 'officially' launched it.

After a while I noticed not only that no pages were indexed by Google, but also that the domain name might have been previously banned. I wrote Google about this, telling them that this domain now belongs to a new owner, that it's a brand new website and asked them to consider lifting the ban. I'm sure this will take a while so I'm also thinking to move the whole thing under another name.

What would you do? What's your advice on this? I won't be suffering from losing any current visitors, due to this being really new and I could always do a redirect anyway.

 

I'm in this position aswell. If you've spent money devloping links, then I'd wait for the ban to be lifted. If not, and it's brand new, personally - i would change domain, unless it's a top quality name. If it's two-a-penny, I'd change.

 

William Martin> Thanks for your opinion. No money spent on links, but I got them anyway - it's a news site so I can get good links quite easily - not permanent ones, though Anyhow, I'll probably wait for another week or so to see G's reaction to my request.

if ($no_reaction) change_domain_name();

Code (markup):

 

Hi

I had some paid for links pointing to my site - i was advised to remove them and i got my PR back at next page rank update.
Double check that you are doing everything above board and i am sure you will get your pr back

 

Thanks for the advice, but it's not my case

 

I'm in the same position. Check out my earlier posts (they have been moved to a site admin section)
My advice would be - give up now. Google tell me in writing my site isn't banned, tell me all is well, but even weeks after the reinclusion request was approved, the site isn't indexed (except the home page) or cached at all, and all the pages listed as being 'from the site' are pages that belong to the previous owner (which google told me they had removed, following a 'URL reinclusion request'.
I would definitely stick with it, except for some decent links that are a hassle to change.
PR after recent change is of course 0, while my other newer, less linked sites are PR 2 - 5.
If you can change without too much grief, I would.

 

Could take up to 6 months for them to "unban" the site from my experience.

 

If you only put it up on April 1st, then don't be impatient, wait another few weeks. Make sure your home page is linked to by at least one web site that is also indexed in Google, so Google knows your website isn't an orphan.

You also might want to think about optimizing your HTML. I've discovered that Google likes pages where there is a high ratio of body text to HTML. My theory is that it's because it takes less spider bandwidth to crawl the page and determine what's on it if there's less HTML and more text. There's also got to be a healthy amount of content - I clicked on your "Apple CTO to leave" link & I see one very small article and lots and lots of links. In search engine parlance, your one small article is called the "body text". Links are called "link text". You've got lots and lots and lots and lots of link text to very little body text - something else Google also hates.

Just by looking at your HTML at WorldGala.com, you've got tables embedded inside tables - I've discovered that Google doesn't like that because it takes up spider bandwidth - and it slows browsers, too, because the browser needs to figure out how the entire outer table renders first before rendering any table cell, which slows page display.

I can tell you that my pages ranked significantly higher for my targeted keywords when I cleaned up the HTML and used style sheet formatting everywhere while retaining the exact same look. My rule is I keep my pages under 30K in size.

Also keep in mind that if you use Google ads on your pages, per Google's rules it must be the only syndicated ad on the page.

Don't nest tables, use an included style sheet, and give body text. As a rule think about what would make things easier for Google, the browser, and the user.

 

Hey!

I do appreciate the fact that you took the time to write all that and your advice is welcome, but the thing is a bit more simple to me: domain looks banned as a simple search for WorldGala.com won't show me google saying "If the URL is valid, try visiting that web page by clicking on the following link: worldgala.com" which it does for even newer websites. I must recognize the design is a bit intricated tablewise, but that's not an impediment in getting listed at least with the homepage. The homepage is not links only, there are lots of headlines, but some text there as well. It's actually how a news website would look. As a news website, I get links from where I want and from where I don't and - for example - I got 3k uniques today. Yet another reason to have it listed by now, or AT LEAST accepted as redirect. I'm not expecting it to immediately crawl my pages. Things - as I said - are much simpler. Even Google's sitemaps' crawler won't crawl the website which again makes me think I had a very bad idea when I chose that domain name. It's all about waiting until G unbans it or simply changing it.

Thank you