Why is my website banned?
-
IMy website is Costume Machine at www.costumemachine.com . My site has been banned for 1 year now. I have requested that google reconsider my site 3 times without luck.
The site is dynamic and basically pulls in feeds from affiliate sites. We have added over 1,500 pages of original content. The site has been running great since 2008 without any penalties. I don't think I got hit with any linking penalty. I cleaned up all questionable links last November when the penalty hit.
Am I being hit with a "thin" site penalty? If that is the issue what is the best way to fix the problem?
-
I recieved this Google reply to my latest reconsideration request. Maybe you can gather some insight from their resonse. I'm trying to decide if its a content issue or a linking issue google is taking exception to with my site. Any insight would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Todd
Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.costumemachine.com/,
We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www.costumemachine.com/ for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
We've reviewed your site and we believe that some or all of your pages still violate our quality guidelines.
In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from http://www.costumemachine.com/ may not appear or may not rank as highly in Google's search results, or may otherwise be considered to be less trustworthy than sites which follow the quality guidelines.
If you wish to be reconsidered again, please correct or remove all pages that are outside our quality guidelines. When such changes have been made, please visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?hl=en and resubmit your site for reconsideration.
If you have additional questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality
-
I believe they report when you have malwae or been hacked, but not when uyou have been flaged
-
When I go to google and search [costumemachine.com] your site is the first result and it has six sitelinks.
When you are looking at your metrics for the last year and comparing it to times prior, what is it that you see has changed? Are you doing OK in organic Bing and Yahoo and just having problems with Google?
That said, I'm having a very hard time finding 15 pages of original content, much less 1,500 pages of original content. Like others have mentioned, the tags and filters seem to be off. When I'm looking at 1st Birthday Costumes, the list of other 1st birthday costumes includes a hot dog adult link, as well as links that have no results (covenant slayer faith). Correction: now that I look more carefully at the page, it says nothing found for 1st birthday party theme, even though I clicked a link there, so it's just showing me random stuff for adults.
Like the others mentioned, I'm having a hard time seeing the value of this site to a user. Google wants people to have a good experience when a user finds a site, and there are other sites in this area that do a better job.
-
Hi Todd,
IMO you're intuition is right and Irving is saying a correct thing in the first point.
I too have noticed that you have pagination issues and that all the paginated urls have the same title html, substantially the same content. I suggest you to not let SE to index the paginated pages using "meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow". That way you will resolve a good number of duplication issues.
About thin content... yes, the content describing the categories and sub categories would not win the Pulitzer. Try to be more original and apply the content curation practice in order craft exceptional category description.
One thing I don't like of your site - without offence - is the fact that it is clearly an affiliate site: to click on a product and find myself directly sent to product page on the real site is not really giving me a great impression. Therefore, and you have nothing to loose after a 1 year buried in the serps, I would start reconsidering an integral re-definition of the site.
-
How many times did you submit for reconsideration? When was the last time, did you give specific examples of what you fixed?
I assume most of the link building was done to your homepage? If so, download all links pointing to your homepage with GWMT and use this tool to go through them one at a time.
http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/text-link-tool.htm
a) If you see a site that looks shady reach out to the webmaster and tell him you need the site removed. Keep a record so you can follow up. Shady means links to adult, casino and med sites.
b) Remove any sitewide links pointing to your site
c) remove any sites linking to you that are penalized in Google
Time consuming process, but as you make progress you can submit reconsideration requests periodically explaining what steps you are taking to come back into compliance. Admit that you were link building and that you fired your SEO guy right away. Explain the steps you are taking to reverse the damage he did and how it really affected your business. Promise to not engage in link building again - be humble and appreciative.
Sometimes you need to fix and fix and submit 4 or 5 times before Google releases the penalty.
-
I know the timing for this site is horrible. I am interested in your help if you can help me identify the exact cause of the penalty. If it is a link penalty I'd like to be able to pinpoint the link or links Google dislikes and fix them.
-
I have check Google Webmaster and I can't find anything that tells me why I'm being penalized. If you know exactly where please let me know.
-
- Duplicate content is not a penalty, but a filter so Google could theoretically let only one of these pages rank:
http://www.costumemachine.com/costume/adult-costumes/sexy/1
all the way to 113 are very similar
http://www.costumemachine.com/costume/adult-costumes/sexy/113
- How is santa getting classifies as a Jew costume lol
http://www.costumemachine.com/keyword/jew/1
- It's not really a "search engine on more than 20 costume sites" is it, more like a affiliate site for buycostumes.com - just a personal observation, has nothing to do with penalty
Anyway, having flimsy content is not something that would get you a trademark suppression so my guess is that these is still something with your incoming links that Google doesn't like. Were you ranking well before? Sucks, this is your time of the year I could have helped you possibly recover if you reached out a few months ago.
-
Correct, the site is not banned but it IS penalized. Banned means completely removed from Google's index...game over. Penalized means indexed but rankings have been suppressed.
As you can see your name is not ranking when searching Google, this is a trademark suppression and almost always means the entire site has been penalized.
-
Have you checked Google Webmaster Tools, they now report penalisation I believe.
-
I just checked and you are in both bing and google
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Using one robots.txt for two websites
I have two websites that are hosted in the same CMS. Rather than having two separate robots.txt files (one for each domain), my web agency has created one which lists the sitemaps for both websites, like this: User-agent: * Disallow: Sitemap: https://www.siteA.org/sitemap Sitemap: https://www.siteB.com/sitemap Is this ok? I thought you needed one robots.txt per website which provides the URL for the sitemap. Will having both sitemap URLs listed in one robots.txt confuse the search engines?
Technical SEO | | ciehmoz0 -
Website indexing issues
My website is being indexed with both https - https with www. and no leader at all. example. https//www.example.com and https//example.com and example.com 3 different versions are being indexed. How would I begin resolving this? Hosting?
Technical SEO | | DigitalRipples0 -
Check my website loading time
Kindly check my website loading time for the home page and deep pages. Do I need to make it fast or it is Okey? Website - brandstenmedia.com.au
Technical SEO | | Green.landon0 -
SEO impact classifieds website
Hi, I'm part of an organization running a classifieds platform in Spain. (Mercadonline.es) We are hit by Google penalties since a few weeks, possibly caused by numerous errors we are experiencing. Most frequent errors are 404's and duplicate content (titles tags etc) since the nature of our website is dynamic. Many ads change daily, are added or removed, causing Googlebots (and others) to flag us and not being able to see our more unique content. Until what part of our platform should we be indexed? Since we have +34,000 pages indexed (mostly due to internal filter pages) I would need a systematic solution for us to display relevant and unique content, with enough usage of keywords that can bring us back up - we are actually ranked <50 on google for most of our main keywords. It is costing us precious time and money since we can only aquire our visitors (adwords etc) and not being to attract any organically. I can go in more detail with someone who can give me a bit more direction. Your answer is much appreciated! Ivor
Technical SEO | | ivordg0 -
Risk of hosting website on internal application server
This isn't really related to SEO, but it came up with a client.... We have a client that is hosting their website internally. That's not a problem except that the server it is hosted on is the same server where they host many secure applications with sensitive customer information. We recommended to the marketing vp to move the website to a different server that doesn't host secure apps so we don't have be concerned about any conflicts. Their IT folks pushed back. So, I'm looking for some ammunition to support our recommendation. Any ideas? Thanks. Bernie Borges Find and Convert [email protected]
Technical SEO | | BernieBorges0 -
Links to Website Author
I'm a website developer, and in the past I have usually added a tiny backlink to the footer of my clients' websites like this: Website Design by MyCompanyName I understand that Google sees this as a low-quality backlink. However, I was wondering if such links can hurt my rankings. Does Penguin sees these links as spam? If so, should I add a rel="nofollow" to the links? Is there anything else I should change? I do not want to remove these links completely because they are good for marketing my business. I just want to minimize any negative SEO impact of the links. I appreciate your input. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | SiteWizard_LLC0 -
Should I promote each section of my website
Hi, i have a magazine website and i have been heavily promoting the main page of the site thinking that all the work i am doing for the main page which includes links and so on would then pass onto the rest of my site but i have a feeling this is not correct. Can anyone let me know if i should be concentrating on each section of the site and also on my articles should i be promoting these articles or let the search engines pick them up. I already use facebook and twitter to promote new articles but i would like to know if i should be doing more than this
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860