Why is my website banned?

[tadden]

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?

[tadden]

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

[AlanMosley]

I believe they report when you have malwae or been hacked, but not when uyou have been flaged

[KeriMorgret]

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.

[gfiorelli1]

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.

[irvingw]

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.

[tadden]

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.

[tadden]

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.

[irvingw]

1. 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

2. How is santa getting classifies as a Jew costume lol

http://www.costumemachine.com/keyword/jew/1

3. 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.

[irvingw]

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.

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.costumemachine.com&hl=en&prmd=imvns&ei=OPCNTraCNI-HrAeCh8SmAQ&start=30&sa=N&biw=1920&bih=888&cad=cbv&sei=DvSNTsybHMbYrQeuvcijAQ#sclient=psy-ab&hl=en&biw=1920&bih=888&source=hp&q="costumemachine"&pbx=1&oq="costumemachine"&aq=f&aqi=g-l2g-v1g-lv1&aql=&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=3619l6784l0l7009l16l13l0l0l0l0l621l4828l2-2.5.2.3l12l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.,cf.osb&fp=334e87e3bc984f2f

[GrouchyKids]

Have you checked Google Webmaster Tools, they now report penalisation I believe.

[AlanMosley]

I just checked and you are in both bing and google