Google banned my site for no reason i know off - can you help ?

[chadik12000]

Hi ,

i bought ihowto.com back in JAN 2012 , it was jailbreaking website , and used to receive around 10,000 visitors daily .

In Feb , Google banned ihowto from their search index.

There is nothing that i can recall personally that may have caused it , unless previous owner did some spam ,

I changed design , (before current one) and reapplied to google but i still go Quality issues , ( i can post messages later here )

so now we changed site objective and design completely so i am wondering what are my choices .Site is not optimized right now , just finish the programming .

1- reapply with google

2- abandon website

3- hire some company to get us back in google .

I am willing to consider all these options

[Highland]

1. How do you know you're banned? Did Google tell you or have you done a "site:" search and gotten no results? Or, by banned, do you simply mean your rankings dropped? A ban will always constitute a drop but a drop can happen for other reasons than a ban.
2. What SEO research have you done? Have you looked at your link profiles? Your content?
3. What does Google Webmaster Tools say? Anything?

[chadik12000]

1. How do you know you're banned? Did Google tell you or have you done a "site:" search and gotten no results? Or, by banned, do you simply mean your rankings dropped? A ban will always constitute a drop but a drop can happen for other reasons than a ban.
2. What SEO research have you done? Have you looked at your link profiles? Your content?
3. What does Google Webmaster Tools say? Anything?

i wish it was just drop in rankings , we were ranked top3 on many jailbreaking terms before Feb /

i want to stay away from jailbreaking anyways and make a more general howto website .

if you search ihowto .com nothing comes and will not link to the site .

ihowto will give the .net site

here are some messages from google , they never say what is the issue !!

Google Webmaster Tools: Quality Issues on ihowto 16, 2012
Dear site owner or webmaster of ihowto
We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines. If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team

Reconsideration request for : Site violates Google's quality guidelines
10/4/12
Reconsideration request for
9/30/12
Your site is now linked to a Google Analytics web property.
7/28/12
The preferred domain for your site has changed
7/9/12
New geographic target set for ihowto
7/9/12
Reconsideration request for /: Site violates Google's quality guidelines
5/12/12
Reconsideration request for ihowto
4/24/12
The preferred domain for your site has changed
4/21/12
We've processed your reconsideration request for ihowto
2/23/12
Google Webmaster Tools: Quality Issues on ihowto
2/16/12
Reconsideration request for ihowto

[jimmyn]

Check themz backlinks. Probably loads of crap on there by the sounds of it.

[chadik12000]

exactly , how can i clear all these before i submit to reconsideration , bec i am getting to be convinced it may not be on site issue , it maybe offsite one .

but how can i clear those spam backlinks ???

[Dr.Marie]

We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines. If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.

That doesn't look like a message about unnatural links. It looks like there is an on page issue that is against the quality guidelines. I have found this issue hard to pinpoint for some websites. Now, if you have engaged in anything "sneaky" then you may have the answer. Here are some things that could trigger this message:

-automatically generated content
-cloaking
-sneaky redirects
-hidden text/links
-scraped content
-creating malware on the page

Your current page has nothing obvious. But you are definitely penalized as searching for ihowto.com doesn't bring up your domain.

I am not sure on this, but it is possible that Google can ban a site because it contains illegal material. (I know nothing about jailbreaking, but I'm assuming it's illegal.) Have you filed for reconsideration since changing your page? If not you could file again and mention in your request that the site previously contained illegal material and you have removed it.

Do you have any sites that 301 redirect to this site? That's a place to look as well.

[chadik12000]

i am not sure about legality of jailbreaking , i am not expert in that field , but there are some sites that have been listed with google for some time and they are about jailbreaking and still up //like ijunkey.com


- i iwsh i have done something to it at least i would know the reason , but i believe it was the previous seller work .

- i do not have any redirect , but i did not apply for reconsideration , but now , the site is totally changed so if the reason was illegal articles they are all gone .

- on a side note , a month ago i bought a wordpress site on ebay , that had non original articles , and reapplied , it was non jailbreaking nature but google still did not include us for "quality issues" again !

Not sure if i should apply now or do something first

[Dr.Marie]

If you've totally changed your site then I would try a reconsideration request again. I would be straightforward with them and let them know you previously had jailbreaking articles, but now you want to start clean with a fresh site.

[Highland]

Try opensiteexplorer.org and ahrefs.com for some free backlink analysis tools. Look for unnatural patterns of anchor text.

Try to remove those links. Failing that, check out the Disavow tool Google has.

[Dr.Marie]

Try opensiteexplorer.org and ahrefs.com for some free backlink analysis tools. Look for unnatural patterns of anchor text.

Try to remove those links. Failing that, check out the Disavow tool Google has.

The message he got, though was not about unnatural links. Instead they said they were concerned about on page issues. I think removing links here could be detrimental.

[chadik12000]

i agree , bec wahtever left over we are getting is still coming from Bing and from direct links .

to me just having an external link to get banned is stupid . so if i go link farm and link to Seochat , would they ban the forum ??

[Doodled]

Hang on!

I've just had a look at your site and the home page just has a few bits of text and a search box. I asked the question "How to be be on google top 10" and got a page with nothing but links to other websites.

Where is the "content". I can't find any - perhaps Google can't either....

[Dr.Marie]

Hi Doodled..I believe he changed everything in response to the penalty. Granted, the current page is not valuable but it doesn't deserve a manual penalty as far as I can see.

[billz corner]

i think your on page problem....

[manmac]

I had a look at your backlinks profile, and even using 2 tools I was able to get only 170 backlinks, most of them really, really bad quality.

I would start pointing to the site some high pr links from themed domains.