Google Blacklist

SO, I hired a guy to build some links for my web site and he spammed a bunch of blogs and subsequently, I was dropped in Google for all my keywords. Is there anyway to regain my website in Google or should I just ditch this project?

You are making some pretty big assumptions here. Spamming blogs should not hurt your rankings just not help them. Is this a new site?

Was your site penalized (and so doesn't appear when you google site:yoursite.com) or did it just drop in the SERPs? With the first, undo what damage you can and file a reinclusion request. If your guy had any kind of access to your site, I'd check for any blackhat SEO. With the second, just start employing regular SEO such as content generation, link building, etc.

In the second scenario, it's up to you to make the call of whether or not you can afford (time and money) to regain your old position depending on things like keyword competitiveness, how far you were dropped, and how much business your site was generating/has the potential to generate.

Thanks for the replies. This site is about a month old and I have been working tediously to gain its rank in Google and had gain frontpage position on about 10 keywords. Currently, this site is still indexed in Google but not found on any keywords searches. My google analytics has dropped from 150 visitors to about 20 and now shows no referrals from Google.

Well I think you just pointed out your issue. With a site that's a month old, you just ran out of the new site boost. It means you're out of your trial period and have to get down to real work.

Hmm this is not my first seo project. This site already has 200 backlinks. The site is livinglohan tv you can see my google stats at livinglohan tv/list.jpg check it out

I doubt you have a penalty as:

1): You are the number 1 result for a search for your domain name

2): the site: command shows 6 indexed pages.. and i see about 6 pages on your site.


You do have a canonical issue that you should fix, but I doubt this is the problem with your rankings, I suspect it's most likely the new site boost wearing off and potentially that other sites are simply out-competing you.

Need more quality links to your site. Getting links from those spammy sources will not help.

What do you mean by canonical?

Your whole site is available on:

http://thedomain.com
http://www.thedomain.com

And your homepage is available on:


http://thedomain.com
http://www.thedomain.com
http://www.thedomian.com/index.html
http://thedomian.com/index.html


So it's an issue as Google doesn't know which is the canonical version of pages and it can lead to duplicate content issues.

You need to use 301 redirects so that pages are only available under 1 version and the other versions redirect to the "canonical" version.

Good to know.

Couldn't I just select "Set preferred domain" in my google webmaster tools?

I guess I will have to wait and see what happens with this site but something tells me that Google has pushed my site off many of my target keywords. Many of the keywords I was ranking in have little to no competition and now I am not even listed in under these terms.

Most new sites get a boost of about this period then they drop into the probationary period known as the Google Sandbox.

Links to your site can't hurt you. They might not do much if theya re just blog spam, but they won't be the reason you got dropped.

tstolber, thanks for the information.

Having not paid as much attention to my other campaigns, I may have missed this. What is the typical time-frame of this "sandbox"?

new site boost I don't think that exist why would google boost new sites? This would help spammers too much.

I have never seen a site drop after a month and I have created lots of listings.

I once got a site listed #5 for SEO book in 8 days after register and it stayed there and is still there today after over 2 years

I would look at the links that were added google will penilize a site for bad links I have done this to myself a few times removing the links restored me to my orginal listings

ask the SEO guy for a list of the links that were added if they look bad try and get them removed

PM me the list and I'll look at it for you

Just remove the all the links to your site. And start building quality backlinks manually