Recovering From Penalties

I was wondering if anyone out there has successfully recovered from either a PR0 penalty or a complete ban. If so, what was the timeframe and was it a complete recovery.

A lot of people seem to think that once your banned / hit with a penalty, that it's for life. Others think its a 4-6 month affair.

Thank god, I've never been hit with these penalties, so I have no first hand experience.. Anyone care to enlighten me?

When a life crisis comes out of the blue, whether good or bad, I often try to consult higher powers to understand why. But those higher powers are just too busy to contact me directly.

That seems to hold true with the Search Engine Gods. I had a very prominant website that was blacklisted over two years ago. Since then, I emailed Google a half a dozen times. I called them by phone several times, and left a message. They did not return the call. I hired a search engine optimization company who had "contacts inside of Google". The SEO company did not receive a response either.

I often see blantant and serious transgressions of my competitors that go on and on unpunished. I have yet to find out why my website was blackballed. I am sure that there is some misunderstanding, but the Search Engine Gods have decided that the domain is to die, and who am I, a mere mortal, to question why they have done what they have done.

twins.fan

Awwww So sad

Are you sure there was nothing that would have got you banned i.e. hidden text and the likes, or was it completely unjust??

It's been said in other locations before that given Google have a large responsibility (whether they accept that or not) that they should provide a pay-per-incident revision service to those who have been banned.

For example, if you had some hidden text (but just a little) and got banned, then read on forum etc.. that it was considered spam.. you could submit to Google a cheque for something like $50 and your URL and ask them to revise it - Anyone else think this would be a good idea???

Thanks for your sympathy! But when I depend on a third party that is unaccountable for their behavior, it becomes **MY** fault. Being listed high in the search engines (mostly Google) is a tactical strategy.

Being independent of the search engines and driving traffic by other means is my long term strategic goal.

I think Google blacklisted my site for totally arbitrary reasons, and they are totally unaccountable and unresponsive in resolving this injustice. Like I said I have tryed to contact them unsuccessfully at least a dozen times and they totally ignore me. Who knows who blackballed my site? It could be some hourly technician who made some arbitrary decision while they were having a bad day . Who knows?! But the decision to be non responsive has to be a decision made in management .

Depending on that as a foundation to my business is a flawed business plan. I now know better, and I am trying to plan accordingly. Don't get me wrong, Google is a very good and relevant search engine. I just cannot depend on them to be fair .

twins.fan

Actually I agree, that why I siggested the pay-per-incident idea.
What do you think of that Idea twins.fan, would you pay $50 to be checked over by a Google employee??

That could actually be a nice little revenue generator for them, so long as they didn't start banning websites just to get people to pay for their site to be checked!!

I whole heartedly agree with you by the way on the point that Google are so very lazy when it comes to replying to webmasters / admins.

Their whole angle a few years ago was that they wanted everything to be easy for the webmaster - and this is the very basis upon which their reputation was built - It's webmasters like us, and sites like this one (which I maintain with virtually no income) that keep Google going. I feel they need to invest some money in public relations...

Whats the bets Google will give this site a PR0 for me making these comments?? - I still love ya Google, but c'mon, some replies would be nice. There is nothing I hate more than typing out a long e-mail explaining a situation and getting an automated response - makes me feel as though I wasted my time.

Now if there's any Google employee's reading this, sure, you can sit back and think "ahh sure we're the biggest and best so we don't have to reply".. maybe, but you'll not be all that big with poor consumer relations like this in 2 / 3 years time!!

Sure Darrin, I would pay $50. I would like to deal with a real person though instead of some anonymous unaccountable email bot.

twins.fan

Couldn't agree more!!

i think there is a penalty for not having your site done in html... my website is done in php and it looks nice, till a search engine tries to crawl it, i have a couple ideas on how to change it for the better but i need my programer to stop being so busy...lol

We have the same problem here. Using less pages for the site, we reduced our PR for many of our sites done in PHP. But never a penalty. We are now in the position of reconsidering all sites done in PHP for the clients that want a better ranking in Google.

the lowering of the pr is the penalty, i think one site i have is at a pr3 or 4, not very good when the other sites with the same keyword come up as a pr5 or 6

The lowering of the PR is an experience shared by many of the people who I have spoke with BUT .. The drop in PR is not due to the fact that the coding is done in PHP..

The reduction in PR is usually due to the fact that PHP pages are called with dynamic variables i.e. somesite.com/page.php?VariableA=something&VariableB=somethingelse

Same goes for ASP, CGI, PL .. This is why I rarely see a number 1 ranking for a .asp page!!

This is nearly always the problem anyway. Although Google is smart, they have admitted that the Bot doesn't crawl dynamic page as easy as they would like... If you've got session variables in there, then you are in some serious trouble, in terms of PR anyway.

If you don't believe me however and think that changing the extension would help, then under apache & IIS you can change the .html extension to execute as PHP scripts - this is known as changing the "handler" and then all you have to do is change the extensions of the .php files to .htm / .html, or whatever else you modified them to execute as .. Done this myself hundreds of times!!

Darrin is right again :>

Google has a difficult time crawling dynamic pages, and if it crawls a page with a ? in it, it will NOT follow links it finds on there... so any hierarchy is never crawled.

Large portal sites figured this out a long time ago .. which is why you see things like

www.blah.com/articles/20038553
- instead of -
www.blah.com/articles?id=20038553

Many php portal/weblog and CMS systems misguide you with the session variables, or barf if it can't set a cookie .. .again killing your crawl.

So the moral of the story .. if you use ANY scripting language ..

* Remove any arguments in the URL (parts after the ?) for pages you want crawled. If you can't remove the ?'s from your pages, make a "/content.html" page, that contains a link to every page on your site and put a hidden link to it somewhere on your site (GoogleGuy says this practice is A-OK) ... this will help google crawl the pages you put on there (but not cache that page, since it contains no text)

* View your site in a text only browser (lynx, or Opera 7 beta in Text-browser mode) and disable cookies/javascript/etc

* Make sure you don't require valid referrers to dynamic pages you want crawled. This is a 'security' thing that makes your site uncrawlable (since google doesn't send a referrer). Several $30k+ CMS systems require this to set their template, and it cracks me up :>

* Don't require certain browsers ... if you put up a block page saying you need IE5 or whatever, google gets that instead.

* Keep links you want crawled out of javascript and dhtml, or create a seperate version of the site for non-dhtml/javascript browsers (which google crawls instead). This one is kind of iffy and might flag your site if google checks the cached content vs a spy browser request, but i've seen sites doing this for years without an issue.

Well there is a wholesome answer!!

Could hardly have said it better myself!!

Actually, having created a few dynamic sites, i know from experience its a lot more complicated than that.... but erm... its too late for me to go on about it. i'll be back later tomorrow or something...

a few things to try, thank you, now to kick my programer in the backside to get him going