Alice "White Hat" Seba Has Been Banned
Look at this...3 blog posts in less than 36 hours. That's not a common occurrence for me, but I had to come back because something happened that I thought you might want to know about. This has NEVER happened to me in the history of my online career, so I was a bit shocked.
One of my websites has been banned by Google.
I haven't a clue why it happened. In fact, I didn't even know that it had happened until my friend, Derrick Pizur sent me a private message yesterday asking me about it.
Well, very surprised, I checked it out. I saw that I had no PageRank and when I tried to look for pages from the website in Google -- there were none. The site had completely disappeared form Google.
I did some investigation and discovered it must have happened on May 21, 2005 because my visitors instantly went from about 700-800 per day all the way down to 200-250. This site made half-decent coin through Google AdSense and affiliate programs, so you'd think I would have noticed.
Fact of the matter is - I didn't notice. I had no clue. I've been busy over the past few weeks and wasn't looking into my individual site stats. All I knew was that my overall income remained steady, so I saw no reason for concern.
Let me ask you this question. If your website suddenly lost 500 - 600 visitors per day, what would it do to your bottom line? Even though I'm hoping you'll say it wouldn't affect you much, I'm guessing for most people, this would be a huge hit to their profitability. :-(
So, what's the lesson? Well, clearly - don't put all your marketing eggs in one basket. Whether it's just having one promotion method for your business or just relying on one website to build your riches...diversify and continue to build.
Of course, if you're just starting out you need to concentrate your efforts to get your 1st project profitable...but never use one method to drive traffic to that project. If one traffic source dies, make sure your business doesn't die along with it.
It makes me think about the "Shocking Report" that has been circulating for a week or two from Jason Potash (whom I just mentioned in my blog entry just yesterday) about people dropping like flies of search engines. If you haven't had a chance to look at, I recommend you do so.
And please note - my site wasn't even one of those auto-generated junk pages Jason talks about in the report. It was a site full of good and useful content and yet Google decided to obliterate me...so don't think it can't happen to good people like you and I.
Here's the report in PDF format:
http://www.aliceseba.com/trafficreport.pdf
One of my websites has been banned by Google.
I haven't a clue why it happened. In fact, I didn't even know that it had happened until my friend, Derrick Pizur sent me a private message yesterday asking me about it.
Well, very surprised, I checked it out. I saw that I had no PageRank and when I tried to look for pages from the website in Google -- there were none. The site had completely disappeared form Google.
I did some investigation and discovered it must have happened on May 21, 2005 because my visitors instantly went from about 700-800 per day all the way down to 200-250. This site made half-decent coin through Google AdSense and affiliate programs, so you'd think I would have noticed.
Fact of the matter is - I didn't notice. I had no clue. I've been busy over the past few weeks and wasn't looking into my individual site stats. All I knew was that my overall income remained steady, so I saw no reason for concern.
Let me ask you this question. If your website suddenly lost 500 - 600 visitors per day, what would it do to your bottom line? Even though I'm hoping you'll say it wouldn't affect you much, I'm guessing for most people, this would be a huge hit to their profitability. :-(
So, what's the lesson? Well, clearly - don't put all your marketing eggs in one basket. Whether it's just having one promotion method for your business or just relying on one website to build your riches...diversify and continue to build.
Of course, if you're just starting out you need to concentrate your efforts to get your 1st project profitable...but never use one method to drive traffic to that project. If one traffic source dies, make sure your business doesn't die along with it.
It makes me think about the "Shocking Report" that has been circulating for a week or two from Jason Potash (whom I just mentioned in my blog entry just yesterday) about people dropping like flies of search engines. If you haven't had a chance to look at, I recommend you do so.
And please note - my site wasn't even one of those auto-generated junk pages Jason talks about in the report. It was a site full of good and useful content and yet Google decided to obliterate me...so don't think it can't happen to good people like you and I.
Here's the report in PDF format:
http://www.aliceseba.com/trafficreport.pdf
21 Comments:
I thought if one of your sites got banned by Google ... they all did. Was it an Adsense violation or did you just lose your Google ranking?
LOL, Kev. The story is true. The site is malcolmsweb.com
Google rankings, Jim. I'm still earning Adsense income on the site.
Yikes Alice!
Jason P.'s blog post was a timely one. He touched on this very thing...it sure made me think! Thanks for sharing.
Yes, Google can sure do some strange things, I have one site that every few days Google decides to give it a PR7 then it goes back to PR 0, then after 2-3 days it goes back up - the first time I saw the PR 7 I got pretty excited, the site is only about 6 weeks since creation.
Diversify, multiply - and don't forget to have fun!
I'm so sorry this happened to your site Alice! It has opened my eyes to not relying on one SE or one website.
I thank you for being so honest and sharing this story and I hope you get the website back in good favor with the almighty google ;)
Ouch! Sorry Alice, you make me so glad of the decision to follow your lead on putting eggs in different baskets ;-)
Appreciate you sharing this
Goodness that's nuts. What did they think was wrong with your site?
MLMBlonde
I took a look at your site and found it quite informative, unlike many of the page generator sites that seem to get high ranking. I can't really figure out why Google would have a problem with your site.
Alice, just want you say how much I enjoy your newsletter. Of all the ones I get, yours is the best.
I just finished reading the Google spamguide, which I'm sure you've seen as well. I wonder if maybe your site was reviewed by a human reviewer. I guess human reviewers are both good and bad for affiliate sites - depending on what mood they're in and how carefully they look at your site.
I took a look at malcomsweb.com and saw that it contains a lot of great content. I wonder though if maybe the look of the site might raise some flags with Google reviewers.
Some observations:
1. The title on the homepage in large red font sort of looks like a sales letter on a mini-site.
2. Lot's of Google AdSense on the pages, not located in just one section and some of it could be confused with navigation links.
3. The article links are not very high on the page.
The Google spamguide refers to "thin affiliate" sites and describes what to look for. malcomsweb.com is clearly a professionally built site, but I wonder if a reviewer might be too quick to penalize it for its look.
Just some thoughts FWIW. Please keep up the great work and thanks for the helpful information.
It may just be me but I tried to go to that url and it's just a bunch of links on a placeholder page. It's like one of those pages that shows up when the domain has expired. Is anyone else getting that? It's malcomsweb.com, right?
Thanks Rich. Another subscriber suggested a similar thing to me. Who knows.
I admit the AdLinks on the left was an experiment in how high a CTR I could get...but Google gave me that tool. ;-)
Ah well. I will probably fix up the left navigation to make it less confusing and we shall see.
Thanks for your input, thoughts and good wishes.
Johnny...you have the URL spelled wrong. You're missing an l before the last m.
Copy and paste this:
http://www.malcolmsweb.com
Well I sure would hope you weren't penalized for the links on the left because google gave you that tool.
You should be able to put them wherever you want on the page. Ah well. Fingers crossed you get listed again quickly.
Thanks for sharing this...we've been doing A LOT on ebay and had similar experiences...TOP RANKINGS for weeks then BAM...drop off the face of the earth. I'm all for diversifying hence the reason for starting two new websites (an ecommerce store and a mini-site) in addition to an already established content site.
I, too, really enjoy your newsletter Alice...thanks!
Could be as simple as being on the same server as some bad guys, so Google blocked the server.
I just tried to get through to the site and got Cannot find server or DNS Error
Google is probably waiting for you to ask them why they did it. Their attitude is similar to being on the front line of a war: "Kill 'em all and let god (Google reviewer) sort it out."
Hi Michael. Thanks for the input. I hope it's not the case...it's only my sites on that server. However, I think my friend was a victim of this last summer and when she moved to her own server, she was admitted back into Google.
Also, my server is down as we I write this. ARGH...but I don't buy the "your server was down" and that's why your listing may have been removed. It takes some serious downtime for that to happen.
I have a website that has been down since the end of October 2005 and still has 21 pages listed in Google. Go figure!
Thanks again everyone for your input. Only time shall tell.
I don't think its the adsense. That wouldn't really make much sense. They tell you that you can put up to 3 ads on a page, so why would they boot you for doing what they allow? My guess is the lack of original content, but this is a stupid reason as well.
"don't think it can't happen to good people like you and I" should be "don't think it can't happen to good people like you and I." Another bad writer with kids.
That's funny, "Anonymous" because the two things you wrote are exactly the same. I assume you are telling me that I should have written "you and me."
Are you my Grade 11 English school teacher? If so....I make more money than you do. ;-)
Side note - I used to take the time to correct people's grammar years ago and I would have noticed errors like the one you attempted to point out. Now that I stopped doing that, I have a lot more friends. It's all about perspective, my friend.
Except for the fullstop at the end?
Wow my site was affected some time back too. It is an Africa Travel blog. I had just registered a new domain and i decided to park the old one on top of the new one. Google accessed my new site thru the old domain and guess what... it was indexing content on the new domain like it was the old one. Finally i removed the domain i had park. It took months for google to return.
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