Site no longer listed!

[joanniac]

My site www.basketsbyjojo.com is no longer indexed in Google. Untill 2 weeks ago I had a page rank of 5/10 with 72 backlinks. Was ranked 7 for search term baskets, and 34 for gift baskets and could be found with other search terms. Now, it's not listed. Can someone check my source code. I know i'm not spamming and nothing has changed so why would this happen?? Can a competor site do something to get me knocked off?

I've resubmitted, I know google crawled my site by the logs, but nothing is happening.

I need an explaination and I don't understand. It would be so much appreciated if someone can shed some lite on this for me...

Thank you.

[cbp]

Looks like you got banned for something.

CBP

[tacimala]

I noticed that several sites have been dropped lately? What causes a site to be banned from Google other than the improper SEO techniques? Is there any way to reverse being banned?

[adore]

It's difficult to say why you have been banned. Maybe you linked to inappriopriate sites?
Maybe you used some spam techniques?
I don't know.
To remove ban, you need to make sure you don't cheat Google and then write to webmaster@google.com with request to unban your site. I think it's the only method as ban is not removed automatically.

[joanniac]

Thank you for your responses. I guess I was looking for some advice and help on my meta's to make sure they were properly stuctured and if anyone could figure out why my site was banned.

I have written to google twice but no response.

Thank you your help anyway.

[tacimala]

Looking at some Google resource pages, there are some other possibilities as to why you could be dropped including your server's network running poorly when Google spidered the site. Hopefully it's as easy as that and we'll both find our sites indexed again soon.

[joliettech]

joanniac,

I just took a look at your code. I don't think you need all the meta tags that you have. I would get rid of everything except "description" & "keywords". I guess you could leave the robots tag or use a robots.txt file.

Good luck,

[scallihan]

You've got FOUR META elements that repeat the same extensive list of keyword phrases (VW96.objecttype, DC.Title, DC.Subject, DC.Description), and which serve no purpose except to try to fool search engines into giving you a higher listing. This is no different than using comment codes to include hidden text in your page.

[Mel]

Joanniac

I see nothing on your site that would cause all your pages to be dropped from the Google index, and thus would suspect that a likely cause could be server problems. Your robots.txt file seems fine,

The timing of your ban coincides with the time that many sites were dropped by google for duplicate content, and that is a possible cause, but one that is best assessed by you. I note that you have an affiliate program, and that might generate duplicate content.

Though I have never seen a total ban due to links to a bad neighborhood, I do note that you have many, many links to link exchange programs; any one of the sites that you link to receiving a PR0 penalty could also attract the same penalty to your site.

Sorry I can't be more precise, but that is all that I can see that might cause a ban.

[tacimala]

Originally Posted by Mel

The timing of your ban coincides with the time that many sites were dropped by google for duplicate content, and that is a possible cause, but one that is best assessed by you.

Hi Mel, can you please explain that a bit more in depth? Thanks!

[Mel]

About two or three weeks ago Google dropped many pages and even completes sites due to them having duplicate content with other sites on the web.

It appears that in the case of duplicate content being found Google will leave the earliest version of the content alone and panelize or ban sites with a later version.

It also appeares that a page does not have to be an exact duplicate of another page to attract a penalty, but some percentage of duplicate content is enough. This may be a one time run at duplicate content (as Google is wont to run one off spam campaigns from time to) or it may be a permanent part of the algo.

It may also be related to the Google duplicate content patent received in December 2003.

Hope this helps.

[Craig C]

Yup, that seems to be what happened. A quick search of some of your item descriptions turns up dozens of word for word duplicates on several other sites.

I don't think there is a simple fix, you will probably need to rewrite the descriptions of your products to get relisted.

Craig

[joanniac]

Thank you all. But what I don't understand is, the copy description used is given by the dropshipper to the gift basket companies to use on their sites for the products so this would not be a copywrite issue. I also did a search on duplicate content and it appears that there are hundreds of sites using the same content for those gift baskets yet those sites don't appear to be harmed by this rule. I will go and change the content descriptions and test this theory. I'll let you know what happens.

Again thank you all for your helpful input.

[scallihan]

Originally Posted by joanniac

I also did a search on duplicate content and it appears that there are hundreds of sites using the same content for those gift baskets yet those sites don't appear to be harmed by this rule.

One of the hazards of just republishing stock material. Important to personalize and individualize the page, not just republish it as given. If those "hundreds of sites using the same content" are appearing in Google, but you aren't, that just probably means they've better optimized their pages for keywords and have got more and better backlinks than you have.