I have a penalized site and don't know what the cause is
-
I have a site which appears to have a Google indexation penalty. According to Google because its violating the T/Cs.
Here are some background details about the site:
The site is a online poker + deposit methods related site on a .co.uk TLD. It has 30+ uniquely written pages, and no advertising at the moment.
In June of 2010, June 10 to be precisely, I bought this site from a fellow webmaster/affiliate. After the site 's ownership changed I tried accessing the server, but I couldn't log into it . I noticed that this host had serious problems and the IP was unreachable. After trying for some time the previous owner got me all the content in Word files and I created a new hosting account and re-launched the site on June 28.
Between a couple of days after June 10 and June 28, the site was unreachable, and completely de-indexed from Google.
When I re-launched the site, I used the default Wordpress Template Twenty Ten, and created new pages with the Word files I received from the previous owner.
I waited a bit, but noticed the site didn't get re-indexed. So on August 18th I moved the content of domain xxx.com to yyy.co.uk/xxx/ and 301-ed all the former locations, hoping that this might help yyy.co.uk get indexed..... but nothing.
On October 28 of 2010 I submitted my first reconsideration request, which was processed on November 17th without any change. At that time Google didn't say if anything was wrong like now, so I just waited... and waited... and waited some more.
At some point I was ready to let this one go, as I didn't/don't see any problems with it. In fact, it used to be indexed before.
By now, I removed all links pointing to it that I had control off, and there are hardly any left over. The site as well doesn't have any outgoing links left, so that can't be it either. I also removed a kind-a duplicate keyword heavy menu from the sidebar, as well as the widgets from the footer. Finally I also fixed a problem caused by Yoast Wordpress SEO Plugin, but I only installed this plugin recently, so that could not be the problem that caused the penalty.
So after another reconsideration request Google again let me know this site still has issues, but I really have no clue which, or how to find out. I don't feel like doing any work on this site, as there is no guarantee that it will ever lose its penalty.
What should I do now?
-
Was a bit sarcastic with my answer
but yeah the site is added to WMT and nothing funky to discover that explains the penalty.
-
Nope, but WMT has a diagnostic section that would tell you if Google thought you had anything bad on your site or maybe give you a little clue as to why you were excluded.
I assume your reluctance stems from some other Google Account infraction that you've not mentioned?
-
Uhm, do you know of a way of requesting for a re inclusion outside of Webmaster Tools?
-
Firstly let me congratulate you on choosing such an excellent poker room to promote
Our promos are a bit out of date though you'll want to get the Summer Gifts up as players generally like it and can usually get something from it
Task in hand though... Hard to tell, you're obviously not indexed, but couldn't tell you why just by looking.
Add webmaster tools to your site as it will often tell you why you have received a penalty.
It could be you'll just have to keep submitting reinclusion requests until you get someone sympathetic. You don't seem to be doing anything wrong (no adsense on the site, nothing dodgy in the code... that I can see). If you had malware on your old host it could be getting held against you, but unless Google tells you what's wrong...
Maybe they just don't like you using Piwik's analytics over theirs!
-
Thanks for your reply.
When I bought the site, before the down period, it didn't have any issues and all content was still indexed.
Unfortunately, Google didn't say anything about it. I get the awkward feeling the reviewer in question might have a personal problem with the specific niche being online poker.
The site's URL is depositpoker.co.uk - I used the default Wordpress template to avoid any possible issues, but that doesn't mean I don't have the intention to use a nicer one, once the site gets indexed
On every re inclusion attempt I explained exactly what I did and tried to address everything that could have been wrong. Now, it's just content, but I am left clueless why they don't allow it back in the SERPs.
I have one site pages, just being there to age domains, which have no problem getting indexed. So I don't see why this one is.
-
The summary is you bought a site which had problems with Google. You addressed some of the issues, but clearly there are issues which remain.
Did Google offer any other details other then the site violates their T&Cs?
Do you have any idea what the problem could be?
What is the site URL? We need to be able to see the site to determine if there are any apparent issues.
The bottom line, you need to correct any issues, then submit another reconsideration request. You will need to explain to Google that you purchased the site and have been trying to clean it up.
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
-
Why are only PDFs on my client's site being indexed, and not actual pages?
My client has recently built a new site (we did not build this), which is a subdomain of their main site. The new site is: https://addstore.itelligencegroup.com/uk/en/. (Their main domain is: http://itelligencegroup.com/uk/) This new Addstore site has recently gone live (in the past week or so) and so far, Google appears to have indexed 56 pdf files that are on the site, but it hasn't indexed any of the actual web pages yet. I can't figure out why though. I've checked the robots.txt file for the site which appears to be fine: https://addstore.itelligencegroup.com/robots.txt. Does anyone have any ideas about this?
Technical SEO | | mfrgolfgti0 -
An article we wrote was published on the Daily Business Review, we'd like to post it on our site. What is the proper way?
Part 1
Technical SEO | | peteboyd
We wrote an article and submitted it to the Daily Business Review. They published the article on their website. We want to also post the article on our website for our users but we want to make sure we are doing this properly. We don't want to be penalized for duplicating content. Is this the correct way to handle this scenario written below? We added a rel="canonical" to the blog post (on our website). The rel="canonical" is set to the Daily Business Review URL where the article was originally published. At the end of the blog post we wrote. "This article was originally posted on The Daily Business Review." and we link to the original post on the Daily Business Review. Should we be setting the blog post (on our website) to be a "noindex" or rel="canonical" ? Part 2 Our company was mentioned in a number of articles. We DID NOT write those articles, we were only mentioned. We have also posted those same articles on our website (verbatim from the original article). We want to show our users that we have been mentioned in highly credited articles. All of these articles were posted on our website and are set to be a "noindex". Is that the correct thing to do? Should we be using a rel="canonical" instead and pointing to the original article URL? Thanks in advance MOZ community for your assistance! We tried to do the leg work of our own research for the answers but couldn't find the exact same scenario that we are encountering**.**0 -
Why can't I rank for my brand name?
We are soon to launch a new company in New Zealand called Zing. I have been tasked with the challenge of ranking as highly as possible for anything to do with Zing before launch in February. Zing is in the financial industry so my colleagues thought that it would be a good idea to make a small blog (very small with literally one post) that reviewed other financial lenders. This sight stayed online for a couple of months before it was replaced. The official website is still yet to launch, so as an in between, I asked that we make a splash page with a small competition on it (see here at zing.co.nz). I would have preferred there were more keywords on the website but this was not achieved. I am still pushing for this and am hoping to get a few pages on there in the near future. Instead of getting the keywords on the splash page, I was given permission to start a subdomain, (blog.zing.co.nz). This contains many more common search terms and although its not quite doing the job I would like, the rankings for Zing have started to increase. At the moment, we are ranking number 1 for a few brand related keywords such as zing loans. This is why I feel something is wrong, because we rank number 1 for over 10 similar terms but yet we DO NOT EVEN APPEAR on the search engines at all for Zing. Have we been penalized? Do you have any suggestions at all? Do you think we could have been penalized for the first average blog? Maybe I messed up the swap over? Any help would be hugely appreciated!
Technical SEO | | Startupfactory0 -
How Many Words To Make Content 'unique?'
Hi All, I'm currently working on creating a variety of new pages for my website. These pages are based upon different keyword searches for cars, for example used BMW in London, Used BMW in Edinburgh and many many more similar kinds of variations. I'm writing some content for each page so that they're completely unique to each other (the cars displayed on each page will also be different so this would not be duplicated either). My question is really, how much content do you think that I'll need on each page? or what is optimal? What would be the minimum you might need? Thank for your help!
Technical SEO | | Sandicliffe0 -
Does adding Tool Tips to a site hurt it's SEO?
I'm wanting to add tool tips to my site as it's intended for non-technical people that are wanting high tech equipment and services. I thought that by adding tool tips, I could clear any confusion they may have about a particular word right there rather then them having to search for what it means. I did some research online and saw that it may hurt SEO ratings but wanted to verify here first before deciding.
Technical SEO | | sDevik0 -
What does it mean by 'blocked by Meta Robot'? How do I fix this?
When i get my crawl diagnostics, I am getting a blocked by Meta Robot, which means that my page is not being indexed in the search engines... obviously this is a major issue for organic traffic!!! What does it actually mean, and how can i fix it?
Technical SEO | | rolls1230 -
How to show a 'We are now...' message for a rebrand and do a 301 redirect?
Our developer wants to use javascript, document referral or adding a URL parameter, in order to show a modal window telling them 'We are now...'. A cookie seems to be too much work. All of which don't play nice with the search engines. Do you know of a technique or method that allows us to be SEO friendly and still give a good user experience? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Pawngo0 -
.CA site same as .com site - are both necessary?
Dear Friend, We representa a major national brand in the auto care industry, and they have locations in both US and Canada. There is a primary content site at .com that we have duplicated at .ca. We are hosting the .ca site on a separate IP on a server in Canada - but by in large it is the same site. (there are some minor changes we made to change US English to Canadian English - though minor. When we search Google.ca we generally see strong search results for the .com site, but rarely, if ever any evidence of rankings for the .ca site. The .com site was launched several years ago about 18 months before the .ca site. Why doesn't Google.ca show the .ca site? Is this an issue of duplicate content, and Google.ca simply shows the .com version which it knew about first? Are we wasting our time, money and efforts having both? Thanks, Tim ps. this isn't about location. We use a separate site to locate local shops, and have coordinated that well with Google Places, and when looking for local auto care - we do well in both US and Canada. The sites described above are largetl content sites.
Technical SEO | | lunavista-comm0