Finally My Site Got Banned By Google
Before I kick things off, I want to thank all of you who have been posting your comments. They are great and help me discover new things every day.
Anyway I build websites both for fun and as a way to experiment with SEO. Recently I have been working on monetizing these projects just to see what the “make money online” hoopla is all about. I don’t make enough to retire, but its fun non the less.
One website I threw up had to do with DRM Free Movies. It was one of my early projects and I have not had the time to really build a valuable website. It did receive about 20 to 30 unique visitors, so I decided to throw up some AdSense, Amazon, and AdBrite to the site to see if I can monetize the traffic. I made about 50 cents to a dollar a day which was nice.
A few days ago I checked my analytics, and lo and behold I was receiving 0 traffic. I investigated to see if the site was still ranking for the keywords, and of course it was not. What was interesting is that the “brand name” still ranked the website, but all of the keywords I was targeting do not.
I believe it was due to human review that my site was removed. Thanks to Rose who posted a comment on Google Human Review and sent a link to SPAM Guidelines.
Lets use this opportunity to learn what NOT to do and how to avoid a Google penalty.
The first indicator of SPAM is cloaking. When you present one page to search engine spiders and another to humans. My site did not have any type of cloaking.
The second indicator of SPAM is using frames to embed the content you want within a page which ranks well.
The third indicator is Hidden Text or hidden links. You can do this by having the same color text as the background. I did not do this technique to try and game the system.
The fourth indicator is a benign domain that goes to adult content. This can be done by purchasing an expired domain or website and redirecting to yours. Nothing naughty on my site… except maybe adbrite ads that feature women.
I think the fifth indicator of spam is what really took my site down. Like I said it was a work in progress so I did not add enough content to make it “legit” enough for Google. In addition I had a lot of ads because I wanted to test which had higher payouts. Oh well it was a good run. I do think this is very subjective and one man’s spam is another’s treasure.
The last part dealt with Thin Affiliate Sites. I will not go into detail, but I think it is TOTAL BS. The definition of thin affiliate is so vague and ambiguous that I can imagine someone getting paid 20 bucks an hour will be able to understand the nuances. Think about it you give that power to someone to label things spam and they will abuse it without hesitation.
The lesson from all this is to be careful and hedge your bets. Do not invest in one site, spread yourself across the web. The Google can’t catch everyone.
One more note… I can’t wait for this site to get banned, and when it does will anyone even see this site anymore?
8 comments
Sounds like a very borderline call. I’d submit a request for reinclusion if I were you.
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What can I say, I’ve been yodaling for the past year, trying to tell people that the only way to avoid elgoogs penalty radar is to remain bent over. The second you decide to mention to others, how G is just another online company, with a service that other companies offer, but lots of money and pretty much the monopoly, and that people are not forced to follow such a companies guidelines in order to make a living online, meh, you see where i’m trying to go here, or not. Either way, elgoog spanks those who speak out against them, or tries to convert them.
It’s sad but true. Google does suck. Oh and yeah I love Yahoo, i fucking LOVE yahoo!!
http://www.iHeartYahoo.com
my orkut site is banned and it shows msg even i write orkut word to open the site
my rkut site is baned ;if i write that word it will give immidiately popup msg and stop me to open rkut . the name of site is here pls joint “o” before rkut.other wise it wont allow to forword me this msg
Orkut is banned in my college…even If i write “o”rkut in google it does not allow me to search for orkut…..i had tried so many proxies but they all were in vain….wat to do…plz help….
You can check if a website is banned by Google here:
http://www.pagerankchecknow.info/googlebannedchecker/bannedchecker.php
This is sucks man.
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