I think I've been Google Axed or Google Dropped, HELP?

[dariuscordell]

It has happend to me as well as of May 9th. I have consitently ranked in the top 10 for years with keywords like evening gowns, pageant gowns, ball gowns, evening dresses, formal dresses, mother of the bride dresses, etc... and now I am no where to be found on google - at all.

Around the same time yahoo dropped me so needless to say I was freaking out! I changed alot of my content (and didnt just lie out key phrases - like above) and yahoo put me back on. I tested it back and forth a few times and was able to see that it was content that yahoo was not liking but now is ok with...but google is not as "forgiving" shall we say with my site as yahoo has been.

So I have concluded that I was banned. HOw do you know that is it or if it was one of the other problems they list on thier site that it may be...Iit woudl be great if they coudl send you an email prior to doing so but I guess that will never happen.

In any event, once you are "banned" can or will they put you back on to be ranked, will they spider your site again, (as we are very well linked on many many sites) or do they just never let you back in....and if they do, when or is there something else I need to do other than what I did to satisfy yahoo.

Google was luckily and unfortunately a huge percentage of my business.

Help!!!!...I am a dress designer not a website designer...or programmer...any help or advise other than what is on googles site would be overly appreciated.

DARIUS
www.dariuscordell.com[/img]

[bugmenot]

I'm an amateure web designer and have built a rather large web site over the years and have paid some attention to SEO techniques. I've enjoyed high search engine ranking for key words in Google and all of a sudden my site has mysteriously disappeared from Google (yet it still ranks in Alta Vista, and Yahoo). I'm reading that my site may have been "blacklisted" and I'll probably never a get a response from Google to know why, but the site does show up in the date base when I search in the google lookup tool, however, it's nowhere to be found any more in page rankings. I did have some pages that were considered duplicate pages with "forms" attached to them but had different titles on them and am curious to know if this got me into some kind of trouble with Google. I wasn't aware that this was going to create a problem. My site is content rich. Each page has its own title tags. Can anyone help out here. My site is my livelihood and how can I get Google to get it back into their search engine?

Can anyone help me, please? I have TWO sites that have disappeared at the same time it seems.
www.deserthomestoday.com is the main site.

Curiously my "blog site" I just started has ALSO disappeared. The "typepad" blog site at http://deserthomestoday.blogs.com/ The "blog" site is maintained by Typepad and I'm at a loss as to why this site has completely disappeared.

Thanks. Carey Parker

With all the money you made on your rankings, now you can spend it on adsense, like the rest of us and get back your #1 spot

[moredial]

Hi Carey

A few probable causes.

1./ I just did a check on site:www.deserthomestoday.com and site:deserthomestoday.com. Google gives a higher count on site:deserthomestoday.com.

I will leave you to go through and find out which pages are different in the two lists. You will probably find that a url is duplicated. Once as www.domain.tld/page and again as domain.tld/page and one version will probably be sitting in the supplemental database although I did not notice that as I did a quick scan through. Once Google has the same page listed twice you can kiss any ranking goodbye for the optimised phrases on those pages - anywhere on your site.

2./ The gremlin may be in someone giving you too many perfect and identical text anchor links. Do you make use of the Google Alerts to send you a report of who is referring to your site or linking to you?

You can not find these links by using the link:domain feature as only pages with higher PR are included in the list. Do a search on "deserthomestoday.com" and you will get an answer of about 1300 pages containing that term. A lot of these pages are sitting in the supplemental database.

You know what they say about search engines and bad company. Those links and references to you are not doing you any favours. Unfortunately, Google will never list out more than the first 1000 results so there is no way that you will be able to find out who is linking to you and messing with your ranking.

The good news is that once your site disappears from the serps you url is also likely to disappear from the pages of all those sites that are in the supplemental database.

The bad news is that Google does not update its supplemental database very often so you can sit with that bad company for a long time.

Two things you could try.

First, ban Google from your site. You can either do this in the meta tags or your robots.txt file. This is very important and the sooner you do it the better. Reason: Google has dropped you so you have nothing to lose and the problem is only going to get worse if you do nothing. It will also spread to sites that you link to - is this what has caused your blog to disappear?

Second, look at all those pages referring to you that are also sitting in the supplemental database. If you can no longer find your site on the page (a very high probability given the circumstanses) submit the url to Google in the hope that Google will again crawl the url and update its database. If you are still appearing on the page, ask the webmaster to remove you and once that is done, submit the url to Google. If the url has ceased to exist you are on a loser because a 'dead' url can live for years in the Google database. (I have one client whose home page appears 4 times in the Google serps - twice on the current version and twice on the previous version, now 4 years out of date. I have just updated the home page - will there now be 6 versions of the same page?)

3./ Another common cause for problems in Google is a change of IP address. This can be either because you changed hosting or because your host decided to reorganise their virtual servers. If this is the cause you are looking at 6 months plus before you start to recover.

As you are doing well on other search engines I do not advise you to make any changes to your site other than to improve on the optimization for those engines. I had one site which used to get 95% of visitors from Google until Google decided to stop ranking me on keywords for the reasons I have outlined above. I optimized for the other engines and now get less than 1% of traffic from Google (new pages and new search phrases only) and my traffic has increased 50 fold.

Sorry if this is a depressing post. If you can adopt an 'I don't care' attitude about Google then you will be well rewarded by all the other search engines who like content rich and well focused pages rather than worrying about which other sites link to you before deciding where to put you in the serps.

[cspelts]

You will probably find that a url is duplicated. Once as www.domain.tld/page and again as domain.tld/page

This is a very common thing - and Google will eventually figure out that it's the same site - you don't have to take any action.

First, ban Google from your site.

I would do a lot more research before I would consider banning Google, even temporarily.

[CareyParker]

moredial wrote:
You will probably find that a url is duplicated. Once as www.domain.tld/page and again as domain.tld/page

This is a very common thing - and Google will eventually figure out that it's the same site - you don't have to take any action.
____________

Thanks for all your help...
I have not changed servers at all. I have not changed any meta tags in a long time.

What does this mean a "duplicate" URL does that mean duplicate content penalty?, and shall I drop the web blog and just simply start a new one with no links to the other site since it's penalized? I need www.deserthomestoday.com desperately, and how can I get them to re-include the site again if I drop the duplicate URL, the above address doesn't work, and I'm sorry I don't quite understand everything.

Do you think if I pay for adwords on the site, they'll get my site re-included anytime soon?

[cspelts]

What does this mean a "duplicate" URL does that mean duplicate content penalty?

Simply put, Google initially sees
http://www.deserthomestoday.com
http://deserthomestoday.com
as two different sites - and it can take a while for Google to figure out they are in fact one and the same. The way to correct this quickly is use a 301 redirect on one to point to the other. End of problem.

Do you think if I pay for adwords on the site, they'll get my site re-included anytime soon?

Officially no, but I have heard that you may get indexed more often if you use AdWords - it won't affect your rankings, but at least they'll see any changes you make. But the real reason to use AdWords is that it will get your site back in front of users! If you're careful, AdWords can be inexpensive and effective.

Read about using brackets to limit when your ad will show up. You would not want to show up for the term California Real Estate - it's much too broad and you won’t get quality traffic – but you would want to show up for [Palm Desert California Real Estate]

You can also put a dollar limit per day – so it you want to only spend $1 a day, that is possible.

[cspelts]

Hopefully this is a temporary glitch, but right now your main site is showing a directNIC error page. I wonder if maybe part of your problems are because of your host? If Google tries to get to your site when it's down, that can cause your rankings to drop.

Your blog is showing fine.

[Bucker]

I have had heard that when Google blacklists you they immediately remove your page ranking and it shows 0...you've got a five showing....I would try to relax for a few days and let the Bourbon update settle down.

Bucker

http://www.guidedbiblestudies.com
http://www.treeswalking.blogspot.com

[incrediblehelp]

um, this could be a problem:

http://www.deserthomestoday.com/index.htm

gives us a 404 error handler page. This is the "Home" link you use on all sub-set pages throughout the website, this gives the search engine some bad ideas about your home page!!!

Of course it appears that your default home page according to server settings is:

http://www.deserthomestoday.com/index.html

Do a find and replace as fast as you can and I am sure you will see better results soon.

Proper internal linking is more important than we think. Instead of using "Home" in the anchor text I would change it to "Desert Homes Today" while your at it.

[rocky1]

I think incredihelp probably gets the prize for best suggestion, and definitely for doing the most homework here. Good find!! If you've recently made changes to the index page that could very likely be the culprit. It certainly isn't helping matters regardless and needs to be fixed.

One thing I didn't see clearly mentioned above was the possibility of being caught in a major algorithm shift. There are other posts however, indicating similar results on other sites, so I would tend to think that a very real possibility in this case.

Further, if you haven't read today's headlines on the Web Pro News newsletter, there is currently one underway, called Bourbon, and it is very likely that there's something on your page that the algorithm doesn't like. I've watched a few pages on my site take the plunge in the past and understand your frustration carey, but as the newsletter advises, you might want to try and wait it out, or at least wait out the remainder of the changes in the algorithm before taking any action. Like you I was at the time sitting page one and two when that one hit me, and the next day I was nowhere to be found, I checked results until they ran out, so I could see what effect attempted changes made and I wasn't in the top 1,000 anywhere. Those listings went from #6 and #12 to outside of 1,000 solely because of the algorithm shift.

Considering your site has always scored well in the past, make a backup of any pages you work on before touching them. If this algorithm is something out of the ordinary, and they should return to something more in the way of routine, the changes you make to fit this algorithm may very well see the same results when the pendulum swings the other way. If you should find such to be the case, try restoring the backed up copy and see if it works for you, before investing a lot of time trying to figure out that you need what you used too have.

And, finally... if your pages are still listed and you're still showing PR, you have not been blacklisted! Don't worry about the duplicate content, or the blog, they're not the issue.