I have just received an email from Google about one of my test sites telling me that it is being blacklisted for 30 days.

the site in question uses doorway pages with JavaScript redirects to the home page.

It is the JavaScript redirects that have fallen foul of the algo. Google have sent me a link to the quality guidelines and also sent me a link for re-inclusion.

All in all, I think this is a good thing. Sites banned for use of cowboy tactics, which I agree that doorway pages are, will now be told why they are on penalty and how to get out of it.

I'll post again later to let you know how the re-inclusion goes.

How did they know what address to send to?

Are you sure that mail really came from Google; check the message headers? Might be someone messing about?


In any case, that exact topic (Google penalising sites using some types of JavaScript redirect) has been mentioned by GoogleGuy (over at WMW) in the last 48 hours. They are on the case of many black-hat spam techniques at this moment.

It might be one of your competitors who faked the mail, but there is a very good chance that it is real. I have heard of Google contacting sites they wanted to include, several years ago - those were sites blocking access using robots.txt or the robots meta tag.


If you're spamming then the watchword is:

Affear!!

[ Message was edited by: JimBot 09/21/2005 11:13 am ... Reason: Spelling ]

Looks legit to me.

Email was sent to the email addresses found on the website. Also to generic addresses like webmaster@ and the like. I was also surprised to find that the host were coppied in too.

Here is an excerpt from the email.







Begin forwarded message:


From: Google Search Quality DO NOT REPLY <DONOTREPLY@google.com>
Date: 8 September 2005 23:10:04 BDT
To: admin@globalgold.co.uk, technical@globalgold.co.uk, [addresses removed]

Subject: Removal from Google's Index

Dear site owner or webmaster of [url removed],


While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your
pages were using techniques that were outside our quality guidelines,
which can be found here: [link]
In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, we have
temporarily removed some webpages from our search results. Currently
pages from [url removed] are scheduled to be removed for at least 30 days.


Specifically, we detected the following practices on your webpages:
On [url removed], we noticed that pages such as
[url removed]/flight-to-sydney-australia.htm redirect to pages such as
[url removed] using JavaScript redirects.


We would prefer to have your pages in Google's index. If you wish to be
reincluded, please correct or remove all pages that are outside our
quality guidelines. When you are ready, please submit a reinclusion
request at [link]


You can select "I'm a webmaster inquiring about my website" and
then "Why my site disappeared from the search results or dropped in
ranking," click Continue, and then make sure to type "Reinclusion
Request" in the Subject: line of the resulting form.


Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team

Thank you for sharing the email. It is helpful.

My two cents - You didn't email them asking and get that as a response? Not normal if it is the case (some say it crosses the threshold of spam even) but perhaps something new and a good thing. I'd want to know, so would be pleased to get the email. I'm still interested if it is legit. For example, can you check the ip of the email header that it was sent from and verify where it was sent from? I have a tendency to believe you Hampstead without doubt, but it would be something 'new' if it is the case so authenticity should be considered by those on the forum.

Regardless the advice is solid and should be followed.

Logan, The message was delivered to info@url.com unsolicited.

I haven't had chance to check the headers properly. I will though.

The site in question has not gone on penalty in the traditional sense where the PR is reduced to 0, but the pages in question with the JavaScript re-direct are no longer ranking for the keywords so it correlates with the email.

It is worth pointing out that there are some more test pages there too using flash redirects and these have not yet been flagged up. I'll post again with any further news.

This is very interesting if true. I've never heard of an SE informing someone that they were being delisted, let alone telling them why. If they're doing that, it's a good idea.

I recently had a site delisted that had 200 or so pages of original content, PR 4 on the home page, several years old, no redirects or anything like that, even listed in dmoz. I have no idea why- I think they are randomly dropping sites in some cases.


> I was also surprised to find that the host were coppied in too.

Why? This has nothing to do with hosting. Google can drop the site, but what does the host have to do with it?

The host would know who the webmaster is, and could forward the message if necesary. Just hedging their bets on the email getting through, I suppose.

The site has now been dropped from the index.

PR n/a

I've filled out a re-inclusion request. I'll keep you posted.

Thanks for keeping us posted Hampstead.

This thread here got a bit of attention today at ThreadWatch and Matt Cutts has commented that it is a new trial -

http://www.threadwatch.org/node/3843#comment-23690

Google is trying out a pilot program to alert site owners when we're removing their site for violating our guidelines. JavaScript redirects are the first trial, but we've also sent a few emails about hidden text, I believe. This is not targeted to sites like buy-my-cheap-viagra-here.com, but more for sites that have good content, but may not be as savvy about what their SEO was doing or what that "Make thousands of doorway pages for $39.95" software was doing. Personally, I think opening up a line of communication to let webmasters know when we're taking action is a really good thing--a site owner doesn't have to guess about what happened. But again, we're starting with a trial program.

I think this is a further sign that google is changing its tone on some key seo issues. I think this is a good thing.

I think it may be a way of "outing" the competition. Google has motives behind every move, so I'd be interested to see where this experiment leads.

I'm all for this. It may have some unintended consequences, but for now I think its a good thing. This will definately hurt many SEOs that run afoul of the engines.

Whilst I think this "help" for spammers and/or bad coders is commendable - I do think Google should help the "white hat" SEOers who follow the SEO guidelines only to be sandboxed for 9 months or a year.

Ending penalisation for putting the keyphrase in the title, adding a site map, adding more content and submitting to directories, etc should be a higher priority to G than helping the JS redirect/white on white text brigade, whether done intentionally or on purpose.

IMHO of course.

Quoting philh:

Ending penalisation for putting the keyphrase in the title, adding a site map, adding more content and submitting to directories, etc should be a higher priority to G...

What do you mean? I didn't know there was a penalty for any of the above. I do it all the time. Seems like good SEO to me.

Ortelius

... and so it should be; but some people are claiming they did all of that, and "by the book" too, yet Google still dropped them.

I have never heard of SE emailing a SEOer about their site getting penalized...sounds suspicious.

There are mentions, even 2 years ago, of Google emailing sites to say they really like the content but their spider is disallowed or some technical problem with the site is stopping their bot; so this is not new.

Matt Cutts in his GoogleBlog, and GoogleGuy over at WMW have confirmed that Google is now writing to site owners about certain spam techniques - in case the site owner was not aware that their SEO is dodgy.

You're lucky to have had feedback from Google. My site, and many thousands of others, were banned last May, just after Google got is license to do business here. (I'm based i n China.) This was a disaster for us and it was caused by the same re-direction pages that we had used for 2 years without any problems. We got no feeback, not guideleines, nothing,even after I emailed several times, apologized, etc.


I can't tell you how much I resent Google. They treat people (especially anyone from outside the US) with contempt.

[url snip]

[ Message was edited by: Logan 09/20/2005 05:29 am ]

flyer77 wrote>
I recently had a site delisted that had 200 or so pages of original content, PR 4 on the home page, several years old, no redirects or anything like that, even listed in dmoz. I have no idea why- I think they are randomly dropping sites in some cases.


Same happened to me. My site was PR 6, no tricks, just ONE redirect whose aim was to notify an URL change.

This has been tested only for about '100' so far so I think the scope of this should be kept in perspective.

Matt Cutts has followed up regarding Hampstead here

One thing we found was that Hampstead got an email to the technical & admin contact email from a whois search. So we’re going to change it so that we try not to email those addresses.

Amazing that they sent this to small website about a couple of lines of hidden text. The URL is mentioned in Matt's blog and they have not taken action to remove it (the hidden text) yet...

With so much heavy duty spam in the se results I am amazed that they are bothering to do this. Surely if they can detect it for this small naive site owner that is obviously not using an seo of either black or white (just bad design - heck there is not even an alt attribute in sight) - they could just penalise it to wake them up? - and spend their time cleaning up the real stuff.

After all of these years of allowing petty websites with silly hidden text to remain in their index...why give them such special treatment when they have got away with it for so long? They should have just removed them years ago, in accordence with their guidelines.

What - is google sitting there being a moral judge and deciding who deserves help as a site owner and who doesn't?

There are many websites that are built by folks who know what they are doing and follow the search engine guidelines and build quality websites that google has punished/suppessed with their sandbox thing. (They are NOT spammers) Why spend energy to help jerks that cannot even bother to read about how to build a decent website?

>>There are many websites that are built by folks who know what they are doing and follow the search engine guidelines and build quality websites that google has punished/suppessed with their sandbox thing. (They are NOT spammers) Why spend energy to help jerks that cannot even bother to read about how to build a decent website?

Print it out and frame it!

LOL - Should I retain my typos with it.

But honestly it steams me to see this... Matt referenced a website they had e-mailed that had a very very weak little spam thingo in the form of a couple lines of hidden text on some pages. And they expect us to sit there and send Spam reports detailing horrendous offences, do nothing, reply to nothing and then they have cucumber sandwiches with folks that don't even know to take their advice???

{edit - slight correction}

[ Message was edited by: excell 09/23/2005 04:10 am ]

Pfffffttttt!!!!!!!!

less than one hundred emails to website owners doesn't equate to the hundreds of hours that some folks that care put into educating website owners, other marketers and clients about how to develop search engine friendly websites only to see the likes of google allow, pander (now - with this).......I shall not go on, but I think you understand me.

oops - I think I have a bee in my bonnet!

Google often do reply to mail, but there is usually a two or three day delay in their reply each time.

Most of the time you still get a canned response.

[ Message was edited by: g1smd 09/23/2005 03:02 pm ]

PR has now been reinstated and site is appearing in results again.

No email from Google this time though

I see some reports that people are now receiving "Google Warnings" about "hidden text" - looks like "phase 2" has begun.

I'd be interested to see what Google considers hidden text. Whether it is the simple same colour text as background or whether they are checking css for things like hidden text in the z axis and the like.

One person had "dreamweaver typos" where they had deleted the text of the link, but didn't remove the "action".

Xenu LinkSleuth found them all, and they were easily corrected.

Wow - that's another level again. Sloppy coding can get you banned!

Where is this being discussed? Do you have a link?

It's a very long WMW thread, started just a few days ago.

Its on topic so not evil to link to -

I assume this one - if not please share if on topic - link]

Also, others have posted additional experiences at the TW thread already referenced. No sign of css - yet - imo.

That's the right thread, and GoogleGuy just posted in it too.

Gogoel Feedback is a start in the right if its true.

I swear sometimes I read these forums and just laugh to myself hearing some of the things people come up with about Google. Most times I never comment as I simply observe but I could not resist today.

Let me state this before I go further. I am all for quality search results and totally against true spam. The problem however is determining what one person calls search engine quality and spam.

Now I am aware of the academic definitions. However, topics like “Ending penalization for putting the key phrase in the title” To even think one should not be able to put on topic key phrases in a title is just plain crazy. Topics about putting down all doorway pages are also crazy.

Let’s think about this for a minute. Doesn’t Google want targeted Content? YES. Do they want some junk spam page generator. Problem not and neither do I. But let’s stay on the doorway subject for a minute. For the SEO guys that say all doorways are wrong, I disagree big time. That is considered good marketing as it is targeted content providing your bringing them to a relative product or service. For example, if you’re a searcher looking for home insurance in Atlanta Georgia and a webmaster creates a directory of pages leading to various insurance and related services in that area it is on target for the person doing the search and the website capturing the searcher.

This is target marketing. Now I will ruffle a few feathers here I know but with any luck maybe some of you will put on your marketing caps and not just your technical hat because I have news for you its marketing that sells a product or service. This is why Google and others are now internet marketing companies.

Don’t fool yourselves, Google makes the majority of decisions by what is going to benefit their $$ the most. They are a business and all about profits. If most of you are honest with yourselves you will say I am problem in this forum to figure something out I don’t know so I can make more profits too.

By now there are some of you that are just all upset thinking I’m ticked off. Well let me open your eyes further. If Google was so concerned with quality searches then why do they allow these same practices in PPC? Ahhh… Yes you can have thousands of pages for each keyword provided it’s on topic and relevant. We call this PPC Landing Pages.

Now let’s break it down even further. The pages that pay the most are positioned at the top. Where is page quality here? We have now created here a bidding circus where anyone with money can buy their way to the top and anyone without it sits at the bottom or spends all their time in forums wondering what’s next. Google just turns the old head to PPC stuff as they are making plenty for this.

So I say to each and everyone of you… Don’t you get it? While I believe that many things done by Google and other serps are good but most are not!! They are for profit. Just take a look at Google who claims they are going to stay a search engine. Lie!! They are turning into more and more a Yahoo portal every day and the very webmasters that helped put them on the map with free content they are now saying, we are big guys now you play the way we want, pay for a lot of targeted traffic or get lost. If we change the rules for organic searches then get inline at the PPC bank.

Wake up and smell the roses as to what is ahead. Google has shareholders to answer to now. Its time to find another up and coming search engine and reset your home pages and tell your friends, family and clients to do the same.

Sorry folks but the Internet has become a giant Flea Market. It’s just how it is and how it will be. The question is, are you going to be on the outside standing in the sun trying to sell your products and services or inside in the AC paying top dollar for a PPC booth?

Thanks for that Logan.

I'll quickly change my user agent to Googlebot and take a look at the forum

Its going to be interesting to see how this is all handled over the coming years. The issue is there are so many sites the have gone offline and are constipated in the search engines. Going to take a LONG time for the pepto bismol to kick in kids!

itmgr, this isn't really news, at least to people who realize that google is a for profit enterprise. There will always be a core of google fanatics who accept totally uncritically whatever public relations stuff is being spit out at the moment, or just will not accept that google is a media company.

"Sloppy coding can get you banned!"

this topic was extensively covered in this summer's bourbon update threads, with the accompanying hysteria such claims brought about.

However, if you accepted the premise, fixed the sloppy webmastering, coding etc, the sites came back fine, that's in bourbon, still waiting to see on jagger what the situation is, my early guess is that sloppy link building may get you banned, but there are too many counter examples to put full faith in that claim.

The best guess I've seen so far is that this is in fact a google database corruption issue which they have managed to keep out of the spotlight quite effectively, which means: don't panic if you've dropped, wait a week or two to see what changes stick and which don't.

Sure wish we had been given some clue as to why our site
gets penalized.

Hi Excel
I guess im one of those jerks Google is helping with a small site. My thoughts on the letter I received from Google is they like my site and the content but there is a page with hidden text which causes the spider to have some technical difficulty and needs to be fixed.

In my case yes, i am a jerk becuase i hired part time Jr. programmers to help with the pages and save money. In this case for a large page on the site with software to download, the programmer decided to Embed (hide) all the keywords related to the software without our knowledge. Probably did not think it would be a problem. This page was coded in 2002. Since that time and before the site has enjoyed very high positioning and has kept climbing in the rankings for 100s of keywords.

Althought the page did not meet Google guidlines, and was only 1 page out of about 700 pages on site with some hidden text, i think the penalty of completely removing the site for 30 days or more is a little extreme. Why not just remove the page in question.

Alot of business hire folks to handle business resulting from the Google index, In the case of a small biz, 30 days and more of very little income can cause big financial problems. Google's actions have seroius effects on peoples lives and they should become more aware of this.

I guess one can look at the positive and say atleast we received some communication from Google on the problem because I am sure most sites which are spamming will not receive a letter, thier sites will be completly removed.

Hampstead, did you ever check the email headers as suggested earlier in the thread?

Its been verified by a google employee that it is legit. Other similar scenarios have happened since also - link

rossendryv - sorry if my post was offensive, and yes I agree it is good for you that Google bothered to email about the problem. my point was to point to a larger problem that exists for folks that do know what they are doing and do it right... maybe google should send an email...to them

We at Google like your website and notice that you have followed our guidelines! Congratulations - please click here to order your free tshirt!

Not to many folks seem to be interested in this subject, i cannot imagine that a whole lot of these letters went out.

How funny, Google removes my site for the 30 days or so, yet they list my site name as a keyword suggestion for a main keyword when using the Keyword Tool in adwords. How lovely is it that im not listed in the index but surrounded by competitors in Adwords when u search for my company.

err are you grumpy/upset? Sounds so to me, if not sorry.

It was/is a limited/pilot test. I believe Matt Cutts confirmed the first run was about 200 sites.

13651 views of this threads seems more than not to many

Sure im grummpy/upset, i think any normal person who has spent over 18000 hours working and developing a business online for over 7 years would be if thier site was removed, even for a day.

Regardless of how I feel, communication like this from Google is a great step forward and will become more efficient in the future, I am sure.

The comment about the site name as a Keyword suggestion in Adwords was for "Ironic Hummor".