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
-
Inspection of the website is required.
Hello, Recently We have a taken a project " http://customerconnect-services.com/ " and are responsible for the Digital Marketing for the website. FYI, we have been following the best On-Page SEO practices ever since we took the project: Performing Keyword Research, Finalizing the Keywords,Using those in the Page-Title, Meta-Descriptions, Heading Tags and of course in the Content as per MOZ suggestions & SEO standards. But, we are unable to rank in first page; which is a serious matter of concern for us. We have also checked whether the Domain / URL has been blacklisted, but it's not (Not even by Google). We are therefore unable to figure out what is going wrong even after following so many best practices to get the keywords a good ranking (1st & 2nd page of SERPs). Therefore I would like to request you to provide your expert opinions in this regard by checking what is it that we are not getting right. The website url is http://customerconnect-services.com/. As this is a high-priority issue for us & the client is a prestigious one of course, please help. Looking forward to hearing from you at the earliest. Thanks & Regards,
Technical SEO | | Harini.M
Harini0 -
Mobile website question
Hi Mozzers, A website I manage has a mobile friendly version of their main website and a /m version as well. I was wondering if anyone had any experience in the best way of handling this? Should we just get rid of the /m version and tag the mobile friendly version? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | KarlBantleman0 -
Why my website sudden gone down its ranking?
From today morning my site rank down in Google search engine http://watchwrestling.co/ Most of the pages are on the top rank of google but now it gone how can i fix that issue
Technical SEO | | watchwrestling0 -
When do I change out my meta tags after a full website revamp?
We're creating a new version of our entire website - look and feel is completely different, though core functionality and results are the same. Just cleaner, faster.. etc. We're doing a temp redirect to the temporary url for testing and to slow roll the release to some of our users for a more friendly approach. Eventually, the new look and feel will be under the original url. I've researched best practices for the site transfer, including "make sure the meta tags for title and description are exactly the same". The concern I have is that Moz Analytics is detecting a lot of errors in the existing meta tags. They're too long, have changed and become inconsistent after being passed through different hands, & some have some keyword stuffing in there. I have plans to change them out and really clean them up... I'm just wondering, when is the best time to do that? Since the tags are bad, should I just do it now but make sure that the old and new are matching? Or should I wait (and for how long?) after the new site is switched over and everything is on the original URL?
Technical SEO | | SFMoz0 -
Moving a website from one domain to another
Hi Guys, I figured I'd investigate this fully before potentially ruining a client's traffic. The rundown:Two websites; one is an ecommerce store and the other is just a brochure website which has references to the ecommerce store. The ecommerce store is hosted on a server we control whereas the brochure one isn't, the URL for the brochure store is nice and simple which is the reason for the switch, as the ecommerce URL is very long and hard to remember. Now from an SEO point of view will it be a case of 301 redirecting every URL from the old domain name to the new one one or is there an easier option? Any tips or links to more information would be much appreciated. Thanks, Dan
Technical SEO | | Sparkstone0 -
My beta site (beta.website.com) has been inadvertently indexed. Its cached pages are taking traffic away from our real website (website.com). Should I just "NO INDEX" the entire beta site and if so, what's the best way to do this? Please advise.
My beta site (beta.website.com) has been inadvertently indexed. Its cached pages are taking traffic away from our real website (website.com). Should I just "NO INDEX" the entire beta site and if so, what's the best way to do this? Are there any other precautions I should be taking? Please advise.
Technical SEO | | BVREID0 -
What I doing wrong when trying to search for links from external websites to my website
This is just the little frustrating question nothing important but I’m sure somebody will know the answer. In the white board Friday this week Rand suggested at one point that when you’re searching for results links to your website if you put a - followed by site followed by your url like –site:yourwebsite.com you get the results of pages with links on other websites but excluding your own webpages but it just doesn’t work I get no results just an error message, any idea why? If I remove the - I get tons of results but there on my own webpages……….
Technical SEO | | whitbycottages0 -
Duplicate page issue in website
i found duplicate pages in my website. seomoz is showing duplicate web pages this is issue or not please tell me?
Technical SEO | | learningall0