Undoing balckhat damage

[SteveGerencser]

I've been asked by the boss to go back and fix their old website since it's been around for years with not even a hint of a presence in the SEs.. They used to rank rather well, but a while back (no idea when) they stopped ranking.. I discovered that at one time they were running some pretty agressive cloaking software on their site and I'm assuming that somewhere along the line they got blacklisted..

Other than removing the cloak, and going through and trying to rebuild/optimize the site in a more white hat way, is there much else I can do to help the process along?? Or are we stuck just waiting for the SEs to see the changes??

I do see the SEs crawl the site from time to time, so I know that they are being scanned, just not listed because of the previous efforts..

[SEOforGoogle]

After you've cleaned up the code, contact Google and explain the situation and ask for re-inclusion.

[brian.mark]

Usually, they ask you to send them a nice letter repenting for your wrongdoing and saying you've changed your ways.

Waiting may or may not get you listed again. It's pretty wide open as to if you're getting a penalty or have been banned in many cases. Penalties can go away, bans usually don't. If you let us know the URL, that would help in determining penalty vs ban.

Brian.

[SteveGerencser]

The url is http://www.imagesjewelers.com

For what I understand, when you used to go to /index it generated dozens of unique pages just for google and forwarded you to /welcome.. On broadband you never saw the jump, but on dial up you could..

I've long since taken that down and started rebuilding the site.. But I put almost all of my time into the other site we have..I'm a former tech/web guy that switched to jewelry design and creation about 3 years ago and just recently started developing a new web presence for us in the last couple of months since the old guys didn't seem to be doing much for us..

So, anything I knew about anything is 3 years old at best, and that's a lifetime online.. So I get to start all over learning again :)

Steve -

[wednesday]

A quick review shows that you've hit the supplementals. Maybe adding 5-6 tons of original content covered with some quality links would help.

[TechEvangelist]

I would start by trashing the Flash splash page intro. There is no indexable content on that page, and without links to it from other areas of the site, it looks like a doorway page to a spider.

Splash pages like this tend to turn on site owners and turn off visitors.

[bhartzer]

Feydakin, I don't think it's the cloaking that is causing the site problems. If it were cloaking, the site would most likely be banned. It is not.

The problem is most likely all of the spammy doorway pages, the ones in the spi directory. Get rid of those and any other search engine spam on your site and start a linking campaign--that should begin to get you back in the search results.

[crankydave]

Drop the flash page. A spider gets there and stops. No place for it to go. No links to follow. None of the internal pages are indexed. Are all these new pages, the old pages or pages with new URL's?

Dave

[ctabuk]

Drop the flash page. A spider gets there and stops. No place for it to go. No links to follow. None of the internal pages are indexed. Are all these new pages, the old pages or pages with new URL's?

Dave
Spot on, every single page has a different tag. Put it back together, and charge accordingly.

[SteveGerencser]

Thanks for the suggestions..

bhartzer, I just ftp'd into the site and see no spi directory at all.. Perhaps this is part of the older content I'm trying to get away from.. I'll look into it and see if I got it all.. What you found may be oler cached pages..

As for the flash page, uh, duh.. See what happens when you are looking for a forest?? At least that's an easy fix..

Thanks for all the help.. Now to wait for the next update..

[TechEvangelist]

Steve, Bill is right. Do a search in Google for site:imagesjewelers.com

You will find quite a few pages in G's index that were in that subdirectory. It looks like a remnant from a former misdeed. The pages are no longer there, but some of the cached copies in G have a redirection in place. If you click on the "Cached" link in the site results page, you will see redirections for URLs such as www.imagesjewelers.com/spi/Elkhart%20Indiana/White-47.html to http://www.imagesjewelers.com/welcome.html

Looks pretty spammy to me.

[SteveGerencser]

Yup, that is part of the damage I'm trying to undo..

I've read that after the third try Google will delist a page.. If this is the case then we just got crawled for the 2nd time since I started cleaning things up.. Unfortunately it was the day before I dropped the flash page so I may have some waiting to do to get recrawled with the temproary index.html..

I love make work.. :p

[crankydave]

Add the site to your siggy here to get it crawled.

Dave

[SteveGerencser]

Just wanted to follow up and thank everyone for the help.. Killing the flash page seems to have solved much of the problem.. 1st page for 'jewelry repair city' for every city we want to be found in..

Now to climb over the top of the yellow pages listings and make life better for everyone here..

Thanks -

[crankydave]

The new home page looks nice! Much better than the "Flash Landing"

Dave