Banned By Google And Back Again

[Kenny]

Just to show it's not always hopeless:

Banned By Google And Back Again

« on: December 30, 2005, 12:23:52 PM » by Andrew

The date: 29th July 2005. The time: early morning.

I got out of bed and fired up my PC. Opened my browser to check my site. Had a look at the third-party Google toolbar plugin (toolbar.google.com/) on said browser (FireFox). It showed grey.

Ice formed in my stomach. I opened my bugged version of Internet Explorer: my PageRank was 0. By now I was frantic. I went to www.google.com and typed in ?site:www.tigertom.com?: no pages listed. I did this for two other satellite sites of mine: ditto.

What had happened?

TigerTom.Com (www.tigertom.com) had been banned by Google. I went to the WebmasterWorld forum (www.webmasterworld.com), and found out the awful truth. Google was doing one of its periodic updates of its algorithm, and had filtered out my sites completely.

Further research there, and a bit of soul-searching, revealed why. I had too many pseudo-directory pages with auto-generated external links. Snippets from search engine results were used as descriptions of said links. Said links were run though a redirect script. These are hallmarks of pseudo-directories and ?AdSense scraper?* sites. Google is reportedly trying to filter these from its ?SERPs?**. I say reportedly, because Google doesn?t announce these purges. They are inferred.

To compound my sins, these pages were also effectively doorway pages?.

The theory was that legitimate sites had been hit as ?collateral damage?. I say theory, in that Google rarely comments on individual cases. It won?t tell you exactly why your site was banned. I guess this is for reasons of time, and to give no clues to spammers.

In my case the ban was justified for my two satellite sites; while not looking like spam, they were effectively doorway sites.

My main site was different. It had offending pages, but was mostly a diverse labour of seven years; a personal site on steroids.

Google bans sites algorithmically: a site that fits their ?spammer? profile gets dropped via software from their index automatically. Real spammers shrug their shoulders and move on; honest webmasters write emails begging for mercy.

Like me.

I did some searching via Google, to find out how to do a re-inclusion request. Here?s how:

1. First, you check your site is truly gone, by going to www.google.com, typing ?site:www.yourdomain.com? without the apostrophes. If it returns no pages at all ?

2. You check Google?s webmaster guidelines at www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html. These are not really guidelines; you should treat them as iron-clad rules.

3. You stop the offending content from being web-accessible, permanently.

If you?re familiar with Apache web-server mod_rewrite you can:

- Send a 410 ?Gone? response to requests for the offending pages, or
- CHMOD them to 600, which will return a 403 ?Forbidden? response, or
- Move them to a different directory if you need to keep them, or
- Just delete them.

Don?t try to be clever. Just get rid of them.

4. You go to www.google.com/support/bin/request.py, tick the relevant boxes, and type ?Re-inclusion request? in the subject box of the form.

4a. You add the complete URL of your site i.e. www.naughtydomain.com,

4b. You state that you have read the webmaster guidelines above,

4c. You admit what you did wrong; simply, succinctly, with no carping or special pleading.

Don?t try to be clever. Don?t argue. Don?t lie. Don?t waffle.

Google has cached copies of your site. When an engineer checks your site, he?ll look for the offending content, and compare it against their cache. He?ll spend about two minutes on it; don?t give him a reason to continue to exclude you.

5. You ask for re-inclusion.

6. You wait.

In my case, it took about a week; a long, unpleasant, fretful week. I sent follow up emails saying what I was doing, and a fax, and I was going to write letters if that didn?t work. That was probably excessive. Once you have a ticket number, that?s all that should be necessary.

They emailed a standard reply saying ?the problem had been passed to their engineers?. That?s good. I understand they send no reply to spammers.

A week later my site was back in. Lesson learnt. To make sure I?m not so vulnerable again, I?m splitting my content to different sites, on the principle of ?best not to have all your eggs in one basket?.

Have I learnt anything from this? Yes. Have more than one site as your ?money-maker?. Spend less time on search engine optimisation and more on traditional marketing. Come up with a unique selling proposition that compels people to link to your site. Easy(!)

Written by T. Donnell

Now I know the date on this is from 1 1/2 years ago, but still.....
it has been done.

 

[Damion]

And if you're banned for some reason from Adsense and you feel or know you have done nothing wrong, meaning you did not commit fraudulent activities or activities against TOS of adsense then the following guide could be of great assistance to you.

Since not everyone that received the much feared "Your account has been cancelled..." email is guilty of purposely defrauding the adsense system

This Adsense Reinstatement Guide is a great resource to get your Adsense account back.
And it has helped people before with getting reinstated.

 

[Kenny]

Thank you Ed!!!!! I have been looking for this all morning,
which is why I keep coming up with these other tidbits.

But this is in fact the article I was searching for.

Well done.

Cyberian

 

[Damion]

No problem :tu:

 

[tetrapak]

Nice, thanks for the info. So if you get banned from Adsense, then if you didnt do anything against the TOS its quite likely you can get back your account and the revenues. (except the days you are missing when your account is not working i guess). It gives me a bit of confidence now, because before i thought if google banns you coincidently then the game is over, but it seems not for sure.

 

[Damion]

Yep - there is defintely hope beyond the horizon

 

[Badger]

Unfortunately, nowadays you are banned from adsense by default. Heres some autoban examples:

If someone files a violation report against your site and your site is already flagged by googles aggresive new 'smartscript' program then its an autoban - recoverable by appeal only.

If someone click bombs your site (repetitively clicks your site ads) and you do not have server side log files in which to prove you have done everything possible to avoid it - autoban without reinstatement

If someone creates doorway/gateway pages to your site which contain adsense - autoban with reinstatement.

Unfortunately, as an adsense publisher, its getting to the stage where you need to remain anonymous on the net in order to avoid these jealousy fuelled lame revenge attacks from your competitors.. I personally know of forum moderators who have had to become ultra anonymous in order to conduct their own business safe from attack....

So, my advice to anyone looking to make money on the net (in whatever capacity), is to make contact with the person or company you expect to receive money from and develop a relationship with them on a personal level and begin building an element of trust - for as and when some little s* of a competitor decides that they want shot of you, you will need the goodwill you have built up to ensure you are not too unduly affected.

 

[Damion]

That is indeed true Badger and is really unfortunate that it has become like this.

All you can do is commit yourself to keep logs of your visitors and clicks so you could keep updated yourself on what's going on on your site(s)
And if you would see unnormal behaviour immediately report it to Google so you are one step ahead. That way Google knows your doing your best to comply with their TOS.

I mean what else can you do right?