Site just will not be reincluded in Google's Index
-
I asked a question about this site (www.cookinggames.com.au) some time ago
http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/38488/site-indexing-google-doesnt-like-it
and had some very helpful answers which were great. However I'm still no further ahead. I have added some more content, submitted a new XML sitemap, removed the 'lorem ipsum...'
Now it seems that even Bing have ditched the site too. The number 1 result in Australia for the search term 'cooking games' is now this one - http://www.cookinggames.net.au/ which surely is not so much better to deserve a #1 spot whilst my site is deindexed?
I have just had another reconsideration request 'denied' and am absolutely out of ideas/. If anyone can help suggest what I need to do... or even suggest how I can get feedback from the search engines what's wring that would be fantastic.
Thank you
David
-
Hi again, Keri,
Thanks for all your analysis.... I think the pages you found on archive.org are the root of the problem - this was when the domain name was 'parked' at WhyPark... I think that's where Google gave it the original penalty - not fair IMO but at any rate I have confessed my sins in this regard ages ago to no avail.
Thanks for the content tips too - I'll fix them up now (there are 5 games currently on the site btw - not sure why you couldn't see them).
Thanks agin
David
-
FYI, I don't know if something's up with my browser (I have issues with Flash at times), but I can only seem to find one game on the site. The links page just has "page content here" as a placeholder, and there's a typo on the cooking mama games page. Those might be signals of lower quality content, but certainly nothing to get you banned.
I browsed as Googlebot via the SEOmoz toolbar and didn't see any problems.
Looks like the site had a lot of duplicated content on it in the past before you bought it. Pulling a couple of phrases off the pages of the wayback machine (http://wayback.archive.org/web//http://www.cookinggames.com.au/) shows hundreds or thousands of sites indexed for the same phrases. I don't see anything that looks like hacked pages on this one though.
-
I hear you - I suspect content quality could go up quite a bit with creativity, some work on the design/layout, etc. Having "more unique content" than competitors is quite a bit different than having an amazing resource that every parent wants to share with their friends because it's so phenomenal.
Re: the domain name - sadly, that might mean you need to slog through every link you've acquired and get rid of it, just to earn the clean slate Google seems to be demanding.
Good luck David!
-
Did Google give any type of answer with denied -- like it's an automated penalty and not by hand? That's some of the feedback that they are starting, and gives at least a hint about the type of penalty.
I see you at least got picked back up in Bing, which is at least a little help.
-
Thanks Rand - appreciate the response.
Trouble is with going the path you've described, the value is in the domain name itself. I'd scrap the site in a heartbeat but I'm hoping to take advantage of the EMD because the search volume is massive - 2,240,000 exacts (that's why CookingGames.com sold, domain name only, for $300,000 a couple of years ago).
Regarding content - look it's about cooking games so it's quite hard to write much authoritative stuff about 'Dora is Cooking', if you know what I mean! I already have more content than all of my competition and am reluctant to spend much more time on it if it's all in vain.
No easy answers, hey? But thanks again all for your consideration.
Cheers
David
-
Hi David - there's only a few things it could be, since you've filed for re-inclusion and not gotten back in:
- On-site spam/manipulation
- Cloaking/redirect stuff
- Backlink spam
I think, like others who answered above, the third one is the most likely. This leaves you with two options - try to get all the manipulative links removed entirely (apparently, Google doesn't think as of your last re-consideration you've gone far enough) or redirect the site to a new domain and start over with SEO.
If I were in your position, I'd probably do the latter, just because even if I could clean everything up, it might take months or even years for Google to review and agree to lift those penalties.
One last thing - it's also possible that Google's keeping the site out of the index because they don't think there's enough unique value in the content. You could try making a more unique, useful site and see if that helps/works, too (I'd probably recommended this anyway for a future version).
-
Hi Keri,
Thanks for the note - answer is no I still have no idea. Those links that Nemek mentioned I traced back to when i bought a 'manual directory submission' service a couple of years ago.
I have actually used this service many times before for various sites to no detriment (in fact when I used the service for cookinggames.com.au it was one of 5 sites in that order -0 the other 4 were unharmed)
Anyway I confessed my sins to Google, named the submission service, explained that IU'd learnt my lesson and requested reinclusion. Denied.
I'm at a complete loss... I've now requested reinclusion about 6 or 7 times now, each time after attending to something or other that might be the key.
I remember about 6 mths ago Matt Cutts posted a vid where he said one of the priorities at Google was going to be giving more specific feedback about things like this. Can't come soon enough for me...
Thanks again
David
-
Hi David,
Did you ever request reinclusion, and have you learned anything more about why Google is still not letting you in their index? I see the site is still not there, and wondered if you could give us an update and if there's anything more we could do to try to help.
-
Hmmm - yeah I see those links. Thanks for pointing them out.
What do you think I can do about them? I have no idea how they got there - whilst I have had an SEO work on this site I've never had a problem with any other sites they work on.
Shall I just acknowledge to Google I recognise these are crappy quality links?
Thanks again
David
-
Yeah, it looks like you got hit with a penalty for back-link quality. A bunch of links is from a group of domains very similar domains (link+word.info) all hosted on one IP. Probably you got slapped for link manipulation.
-
what is the site URL
-
Well the second question is the key! But Google will not tell me despite my pleas. Check the site for yourself - it's no masterpiece but not that bad either.
And re JC Penney - no the SEO guys I used briefly are pretty good with no problems on other sites. Even JC Penney only got kicked down the ranks nor de-indexed.
Thanks
David
-
Oops sorry about that - try this link:
http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/38488/site-indexing-google-doesnt-like-it
(think other link was in 'My Questions' or something)
-
First, the SEOmoz link you posted is 404. Second, why are they denying you re-inclusion? Third, what is on your site that is so bad?? There must be some really spam type content or linking.
Did you hire the J.C. Penney SEO team? LOL
-
Oops!
We can't find the page you're looking for!
You should repost the link or post the url of your site.
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
-
404's being re-indexed
Hi All, We are experiencing issues with pages that have been 404'd being indexed. Originally, these were /wp-content/ index pages, that were included in Google's index. Once I realized this, I added in a directive into our htaccess to 404 all of these pages - as there were hundreds. I tried to let Google crawl and remove these pages naturally but after a few months I used the URL removal tool to remove them manually. However, Google seems to be continually re/indexing these pages, even after they have been manually requested for removal in search console. Do you have suggestions? They all respond to 404's. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Tom3_151 -
Moving wordpress to it's own server
Our company wants to remove wordpress from our current windows OS server at provider 1 and move it to a new server at provider 2. Godaddy handles our DNS. I would like to have it on the same domain without masking. I would like to make a DNS entry on godaddy so that our current server and our new server can use the same URL (ie sellstuff.com). But I only want the DNS to direct traffic to our current server. The goal here is to have the new server using the same URL as the old server so nothing needs to be masked once traffic is redirected with a 301 rule in the htaccess file. But no traffic outside of the 301 rule will end up going to the new server. I would then like to edit the htaccess file on our current server to redirect to the new servers IP address when someone goes to sellstuff.com/blog. Does this make since and is it possible?
Technical SEO | | larsonElectronics0 -
Paypal instead of Merchant's account and will the site still move up?
Hello, Will an Ecommerce site still move up in a niche if it only accepts PayPal and doesn't have a merchant's account on it? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | BobGW0 -
Shortening URL's
Hello again Mozzers, I am debating what could be a fairly drastic change to the company website and I would appreciate your thoughts. The URL structure is currently as follows Product Pages
Technical SEO | | ATP
www.url.co.uk/product.html Category Pages
www.url.co.uk/products/category/subcategory.html I am debating removing the /products/ section as i feel it doesn't really add much and lengthens the url with a pointless word. This does mean however redirecting about 50-60 pages on the website, is this worth it? Would it do more damage than good? Am i just being a bit OCD and it wont really have an impact? As always, thanks for the input0 -
Changes to 'links to your site' in WebMaster Tools?
We're writing more out of curiosity... Clicking on "Download latest links" within 'Links to your site' in Google's WebMaster Tools would usually bring back links discovered recently. However, the last few times (for numerous accounts) it has brought back a lot of legacy links - some from 2011 - and includes nothing recent. We would usually expect to see a dozen at least each month. ...Has anyone else noticed this? Or, do you have any advice? Thanks in advance, Ant!
Technical SEO | | AbsoluteDesign0 -
My website's pages are not being indexed correctly
Hi, One of our websites, which is actually a price comparison engine, facing indexing problem at Google. When we check “site:mywebsite.com “, there are lots of pages indexed which are not from mywebsite.com but from merchants websites. The index result page also shows merchant’s page title. In some cases the title is from merchant’s site but when the given link is accessed it points to mywebsite.com/index. Also the cache displays the merchant’s product page as the last indexed version rather than showing ours. The mywebsite.com has quite few Merchants that send us their product feed. Those products are listed on comparison page with prices. The merchant’s links on comparison page are all no-follow links but some of the (not all) merchant’s product pages are indexed against mywebsite.com as mentioned above instead of product comparison page of mywebsite.com How can we fix the issue? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | digitalMSB0 -
Pro's & contra's: http vs https
Hi there, We are planning to take the step and go from http to https. The main reason to do this, is to mean trustfull to our clients. And of course the rumours that it would be better for ranking (in the future). We have a large e-commerce site. A part of this site ia already HTTPS. I've read a lot of info about pro's and contra's, also this MOZ article: http://moz.com/blog/seo-tips-https-ssl
Technical SEO | | Leonie-Kramer
But i want to know some experience from others who already done this. What did you encountered when changing to HTTPS, did you had ranking drops, or loss of links etc? I want to make a list form pro's and contra's and things we have to do in advance. Thanx, Leonie0 -
Google indexing staging / development site that is redirected...
Hi Moz Fans! - Please help. We had a acme.stagingdomain.com while a site was in development, when it went live it redirected (302) to acmeprofessionalservices.com (real names redacted!!) no known external links to staging site although staging site url has been emailed from Google Apps(!!!) now found that staging site is in the index even though it redirects to the proper public site. and some (but not all) of the pages are in the index too. They all redirect to the proper public site when visited. It is convenient to have a redirect from the staging site to the new one for the team, Chrome etc. remember frequently visited sites. Be a shame to lose that. Yes, these pages can be removed using webmaster tools.
Technical SEO | | mozroadjan
But how did they get in the index to start with? And if we're building a new site, and a customer has an existing site is there a danger of duplicate content etc. penalties caused by the staging site? We had a similar incident recently when a PDF that was not linked anywhere on the site appeared in the index. The link had been emailed through Google Apps, and visited in Chrome, but that was it. So 3 questions. Why is the staging site still in the index despite the redirects? How did they get in the index in the first place? Will the new staging site affect the rank of the existing site, eg. duplicate content penalties?0