Help, my site has been banned by Google! Part 3

Pandia takes a look at more spamming techniques that may get you excluded from the Google search engine index.

Part 1 | 2 | 3

Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines

Webmasters as well as search engines disagree about what a doorway page is. Google is clearly thinking about pages that are only made in order to attract search engine spiders and that lead human visitors to more informative pages on the site.

Hence these are not pages that are normally found in the navigation menu of a site.

Such doorway pages come in two flavors:

1. Nonsense pages that repeat the same keyword all over again or that has text that is so filled with keyword that the sentences become meaningless.
2. Pages with a few paragraphs of understandable text that is relevant to the main keywords for which the page is optimized, but that is clearly designed to lead the visitor elsewhere.

If there are a large number of similar pages that only differ as regards the main keywords phrases, you can be quite sure that someone is trying to spam the search engine.

However, Google, Yahoo!, Teoma or any other decent search engine will not punish you if you write a large number of distinct, relevant and informative articles that are optimized for relevant keyword phrases.

If your readers will find these articles interesting and useful, the search engines will also like them.

Avoid "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content

Google says that you should "avoid 'cookie cutter' approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content." Now, that is a rather cryptic remark!

We interpret this to mean that you should avoid establishing separate sites or doorway pages with no or little content of use to visitors and that are exclusively made to promote a product or service sold by someone else.

Google will not ban you for including links to affiliate programs if you provide high quality content, though. If that was the case, Pandia would have been banned years ago.

Bad neighborhoods

Google also warns you about bad neighborhoods:

"Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links."

Oh yes, this is important. First of all: Check to see if your site is listed on any free-for-all link exchanges. If your site is listed, kindly ask the web site owner to remove you. (Or -- at least -- do not pay them for a renewal!)

Next, search Google and Yahoo! for inbound links and see if any of these come from dubious sites. What a bad neighbor is, is not totally clear, but you should probably look out for links from sites like these:

• Sites are run by active spammers
• Free-for-all link farms or directories
• Adult sites (unless you run one yourself)
• Gambling sites

Active spammers are hard to identify, but you will often find that they run networks of a large number of sites that are interlinked. If they use any of the spamming techniques described in this article, you should also be very careful.

Obviously, if you cannot find the site in Google, that is a warning sign. A Page Rank of 0 could also indicate that the site has been punished by Google (but it could also be that it is a new page).

For a discussion of Page Rank or PR, see the Pandia Search Engine Marketing 101 tutorial.

As regards the other kinds of bad neighborhoods, we would not loose a night sleep if we found a few links from such sites. Pandia has a couple of admirers in the more seedy part of the Web, and Google has not pulled the plug yet.

How to get back into the Google search engine index

At the Search Engine Strategies conference in Stockholm, Shari Thurow of Grantastic Designs gave some sound advice on how to get relisted by Google (or any other serious search engine):

• First, clean up your act.
• Then send Google a very polite email where you acknowledge and describe what you (or your search engine marketing firm) has done.
• Tell Google that you have read their guidelines and that you will never do anything like this again.
• If you hired an search engine marking firm that spammed on your behalf, state the firm's name and contact information.
• Include full contact information.

This is what Danny Sullivan and others call the "Kiss Up Letter". Indeed, do apologize and make no excuses.

Google will often reply to such polite requests and you may find some of your pages back in the index within a couple of weeks. However, it can take months before the search engine has spidered your whole site again.

How to get Google to tell you when you have crossed the line

It is actually possible to get Google to inform you when they believe you have broken the rules.

Webmasters using Google's Sitemap feature, may (we repeat: may) get a mail from Google telling them when they have crosse the line.

Google's Matt Cutts puts it this way:

(...) I think the ideal search engine would also tell legitimate site owners when they risk not doing well in Google.

For example, I recently saw a small pub in England that had hidden text on its page. That could result in the site being removed from Google, because our users get angry when they click on a search result and discover hidden text–even if the hidden text wasn’t what caused the site to be returned in Google’s results. In this case it was a particular shame, because the hidden text was the menu that the pub offered. That’s exactly the sort of text that a user would like to see on the web site; making the text visible would have made the site more useful.

That’s an example of a legitimate site. On the other hand, if the webspam team detects a spammer that is creating dozens or hundreds of sites with doorway pages followed by a sneaky redirect, there’s no reason that we’d want the spammer to realize that we’d caught those pages

So Google may try and tell you when they believe you have broken the rules in good faith.

This is the kind of mail you might expect:

No pages from your site are currently included in Google’s index due to violations of the webmaster guidelines. Please review our webmaster guidelines and modify your site so that it meets those guidelines. Once your site meets our guidelines, you can request reinclusion and we’ll evaluate your site.

If you find the issue and clean it up, then just click on the “Submit a reinclusion request” and fill out the form.

So how do you subscribe to this service?

Go to the Google Sitemap home page and sign up (you'll what to sign up for a Google account if you don't have one).

You will then have to create a sitemap -- i.e. a file containing a list of all your web pages and their content -- according to Google's standards. And yes, this requires some geek competences, although you may give them your RSS feed or a simple text file containing links to your web pages.

Search engine query syntax

To check for search engine listings in Google do a search for: site:mydomain.com mydomain.com. The relevant syntax for Yahoo! is site:mydomain.com or domain:mydomain.com

To check for links from other sites, search for link:mydomain.com in Google. Note, however, that this search may not give you the full list of inbound links. At Yahoo!, search for linkdomain:mydomain.com

Useful links

Google webmaster guidelines
Google's warning about search engine optimization companies
Google Spam Report form
Google reinclusion form
MSN Search Spam Report form
Yahoo Spam Report form
Yahoo reinclusion form
What Yahoo! considers unwanted

Pandia's Search Engine Marketing 101 Tutorial
Paul J. Bruemmer's article on Search Engine Damage Control
More feature articles on search engine marketing
More search engine news...