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How My Popular Site was Banned by Google

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Re: How My Popular Site was Banned by Google

#11
post #3
post #2

I can't judge if you broke the rules or not but not showing up on Google's SERPs is terrifying and a stark reminder on how dependent we've become on Google traffic.

I included an image of my adwords account. The ad had been running for years(albeit infrequently due to very low budget), and I had not touched it since creating it. I checked after this all happened, and there were several warnings from adwords, but nothing from webmaster tools. I simply ignored the adwords warnings as I was not actively using the account and figured they were just disabling ads. If I had know these…

Unfortunately, deleting an AdWords account won't remove the violation; it may actually make it worse. Google will look back several years and disable ads that haven't run for a very long time. Sometimes they even ban accounts that are inactive or deleted!

It is very important to remember: when dealing with Google AdWords, the definition of a violation changes with time. If you violated the current policies in the past, you may still be banned. You take a great risk running there and any and all warnings you get should be dealt with immediately.

That said, seeing an exclusion from organic based on an AdWords suspension is extremely alarming. That may be exactly what the DoJ is looking for in terms of violations by Google.

Re: How My Popular Site was Banned by Google

#12
post #9

Dropping out of the organic results sounds like a result of the Panda update ( http://searchengineland.com/official-google-panda-2-3-update... ) My best guess is that you'll need to include some additional 'unique content' on the site to get it back in the listings. At the moment the Google crawler will see not a whole lot of text, quite a few Javascript buttons and some links, and will probably flag it as low qualit…

There is a difference between a ban and demotion or penalty. He is not even in the index.

I wouldn't be surprised if the Adwords team clicked a box or sent an email to search

Re: How My Popular Site was Banned by Google

#14
From google's bridge page definition:

Not acceptable: "Websites that feature links to other websites while providing minimal or no added functionality or unique content for the user Added functionality includes, but isn't limited to, searching, sorting, comparing, ranking, and filtering"

The page in question provides the added functionality listed (searching/filtering at least)

Re: How My Popular Site was Banned by Google

#15
You have an autogenerated web site that consists of practically nothing other than affiliate links to Amazon. You can make an infinite number of autogenerated pages on your site, e.g.

http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=hacker+news

http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=31.69

http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=teen+sex

and each autogenerated page consists of literally hundreds of affiliate links stuffed with keywords for unrelated products.

When Google's webspam team takes action on websites in our websearch index, we can pass that information on to the ads group so they can check for violations. But it's a one-way street: we can send the ads team signals or information about spammers or other violations of our quality guidelines, but the ads team doesn't send information over to the quality/webspam team.

Re: How My Popular Site was Banned by Google

#16
post #7

Another great example of Google randomly removing sites based on flimsy or nor evidence. The fact they don't give you a chance to plead their case is pretty scary. My hunch is one of your competitors got the site taken down. I've had a few clients who had their competitors file complaints with Google, or inform them they were using black hat SEO to get on the first page of the SERPS. In one case they were successful,…

But often there is a reason why a site vanishes from the Google index. We would have to exclude all possible violations of the Google guidelines, before we could safely claim that this is a great example for random removal by Google.

Edit: In a comment above Matt Cutts from Google gives an explanation.

Re: How My Popular Site was Banned by Google

#17

You have an autogenerated web site that consists of practically nothing other than affiliate links to Amazon. You can make an infinite number of autogenerated pages on your site, e.g. http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=hacker+news http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=31.69 http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=teen+sex and each autogenerated page consists of literally hundreds of affiliate links stuffed with k…

Hi Matt,

Thanks for responding.

The point of the site is to find items of a particular price that qualify for free shipping on Amazon.com. If you want I will give you access to my google analytics to show you that this is a site people want and use.

I guess I should not let people link to the search results page?

http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=hacker+news and http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=anything+that+is+not+... returns the same thing as if you did a search for $0. I will fix the bug so it returns an error. These are pages that no one has ever linked to as far as I know.

Re: How My Popular Site was Banned by Google

#19
post #17

You have an autogenerated web site that consists of practically nothing other than affiliate links to Amazon. You can make an infinite number of autogenerated pages on your site, e.g. http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=hacker+news http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=31.69 http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=teen+sex and each autogenerated page consists of literally hundreds of affiliate links stuffed with k…

Hi Matt, Thanks for responding. The point of the site is to find items of a particular price that qualify for free shipping on Amazon.com. If you want I will give you access to my google analytics to show you that this is a site people want and use. I guess I should not let people link to the search results page? http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=hacker+news and http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=anything+th…

I think he can probably already see your analytics ;)

Re: How My Popular Site was Banned by Google

#20
post #17

You have an autogenerated web site that consists of practically nothing other than affiliate links to Amazon. You can make an infinite number of autogenerated pages on your site, e.g. http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=hacker+news http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=31.69 http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=teen+sex and each autogenerated page consists of literally hundreds of affiliate links stuffed with k…

Hi Matt, Thanks for responding. The point of the site is to find items of a particular price that qualify for free shipping on Amazon.com. If you want I will give you access to my google analytics to show you that this is a site people want and use. I guess I should not let people link to the search results page? http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=hacker+news and http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=anything+th…

Amazon already provides this service itself: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?field-keywords=filler...
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