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
-
Cached version of website
Hi, Upon checking the text cache view of our home page, I noticed the mobile menu links are also coming in text format which looks weird. Please see: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:indialetsplay.com&biw=1366&bih=638&noj=1&strip=1 Our coder told us that he has created separate menu i.e. one version for the desktop and one for the mobile version. Anyway, the reason the coder created a different menu for mobile in order to support the design requirements. Does the duplicating the menu good for on page SEO? Give the best solution for handling it.
Technical SEO | | Obbserv0 -
UK rankings disappeared after US website launch
Hi all, I had a client that recently released a US version of their UK website and put it live without informing me first! Once I saw it (about 3/4 days later) I immediately asked them to include the rel=alternate tag onto both websites. However, in the meantime our UK rankings have all gone and it seems as if Google has just kicked the UK website. How long will it take for our rankings to return to normal? Thanks for the advice, Karl
Technical SEO | | KarlBantleman0 -
Duplicate Page Title for a Large Listing Website
My company has a popular website that has over 4,000 crawl errors showing in Moz, most of them coming up as Duplicate Page Title. These duplicate page titles are coming from pages with the title being the keyword, then location, such as: "main keyword" North Carolina
Technical SEO | | StorageUnitAuctionList
"main keyword" Texas ... and so forth. These pages are ranked and get a lot of traffic. I was wondering what the best solution is for resolving these types of crawl errors without it effecting our rankings. Thanks!0 -
Multi Company websites
Hello SEO community ! Hope you'll have some good advice for this project. 🙂 I'm working for a group of companies just starting its SEO experience. Nowadays they have 10 different websites with different names and pretty much the same objectives. So basicly, > Would it be better to gather all website under one adress with subdomains ? They want to display almost the same info, blogs and products.. It make dupplicate content a real pain and Social Media strategy a nightmare. More info: 10 websites for 8 subsidiaries, 1 holding, 1 online shop Each subisdiary has english + its proper language They want regular posts and info updates (blogs, newsletters) They don't have all the same name They all do the same activity Online shop is full a product keywords Ideas: Working on the holding website as mother ship - for branding (social media), actu (blogs), CM (videos, and more)- Displaying the online shop products in all websites (xml) Diplaying blog updates (no full message) via xml on all websites Linking all websites to the blog, shop and holding Tks a lot !
Technical SEO | | AymanH0 -
Index quickly a website? (Google,Bing..)
Hi, I would like to know what are the best practices in 2012 to index our website in less than 24 hours? (or less..) Thanks for your answer 😄
Technical SEO | | Probikeshop0 -
Things to consider with regards to SEO when redesigning a website
I will be redesigning a website in wordpress. currently the website is html/css based My concern is i dont want to lose any of the Search engine rankings. what should i put in place to avoid that situation
Technical SEO | | mancmusicman0 -
Does running 2 domains from the same website harm my seo efforts?
Hi I run a website which has 2 domains running from it. One domain has a .co.uk extension and shows products aimed at the UK market. The other domain is a .com which shows products aimed at the US market. As both domains run from the same website, the content is mostly identical APART from the product listings as they change depending upon whether you're in the UK or US. My reason for doing is this mainly for paid search purposes as I can have a more accurate domain depending upon which country I target. Both sites are set to encourage the bots to index it, and in google WMT each domain is targeted to its specific country. So, my questions are, Is this set-up possibly damaging my SEO efforts for either or both websites? If so, would setting one domain to no-index, improve SEO efforts for the other? Thanks in advance for any replies! Cheers Joe
Technical SEO | | joeprice0