Domain banned: what to do now?

[Escatesp]

Hello everyone.

I have a site that has been banned from Google, because I have a Flash home and used <noscript> to those without Flash player. Then I didn't know nothing about SEO. Now, I have been banned and I have deleted every single <noscript> from my page, but what can I do to have again my webpage indexed? I have emailed to Google, but nothing, only tipical autoresponse. I don't know...

[bhartzer]

Are you sure that it's because of the noscript tag? If that's what got you banned and you've fixed it, then all you can do is make a reinclusion request and sit back and wait for a Google employee to manually review your site.

If you've already made that request then all you can do it sit back and wait.

[JohnW]

What have you done to verify that you are banned?

[cynicaldog]

I thought I'd post in this thread rather than starting a new one.

I just noticed today that 5 of my domains seems to have been "banned" by Google. I assume they are banned because the Google toolbar shows them all as white bars (PR 0), whereas they've always been a 6 or 7. Also, if I do a search for mydomain.com in Google I get no results, instead of the thousands of pages I normally see. Looking at my server stats, I can see this change happened on or about August 26th.

Rather than beating around the bush, I'll just say that my 5 sites were all "free website counter" sites. They've all been around for about three years. All had unique themes, so while the underlying scripts running the sites were similar, each site's content in terms of text and graphics was completely original and not duplicated in any way. My PR7 site had many, many backlinks from people not even using my service, i.e. links from sites which reviewed my website, blogs which mentioned it for its unique theme, etc. I did have the 5 sites "interlinked", as I figured if a person didn't find the theme of one appropriate, they might prefer the theme of another.

Every person who used one of my free counter services had a link back to my domain in their html, simply because that's how the script code works. The only thing "spammy" about the sites was that each had 10 unrelated text links on the index page. The links were listed clearly as "sponsors", and weren't hidden. None of the sites being linked to have been damaged in any way in terms of search results, and none of them have been removed from the listings. As I said earlier in this post, these sites have been essentially unchanged for the last 3 years except that I'd get new user signups every day.

So, this has been going on for three weeks. What on earth did I do to become "website non grata"? I'm offering the same service I've always offered, and in fact, I was one of the first few to do so. I use .htaccess with a 301 code to avoid duplicate content. Is there any way I can "fix" what's happened? I assume that if my domains have been banned, I'd have to move my sites to entirely new domains to see them indexed again?

Thanks for any insight you can offer.

[cynicaldog]

To add to my original post...

I did an inurl:mydomain.com check in Google and there are hundreds, and in some cases, tens of thousands of people who've stolen my entire site, graphics and all, and have re-created them on other domains. Some people have created subdomains of mydomain.com.theirdomain.com and have copied my site, or are doing weird redirects with it. Can I assume this could be the problem?! If you check Archive.org or just do a Whois search you'll see that my domain was first and my content was first, but perhaps that doesn't matter.

Is there anything I can do?

[Escatesp]

What have you done to verify that you are banned?

Usual: no PR, no site results, not in allinurl listings...

[JohnW]

>I assume they are banned because the Google toolbar shows them all as white bars (PR 0),

If you were banned, the PR would be grey, not white. I would be patient and see what happens over the next few days.


>I have a site that has been banned from Google, because I have a Flash home and used <noscript>

I don't know that this will cause a ban. Are you sure there is nothing else going on?

[JohnW]

>Is there anything I can do?

If you want to PM the URL I can have a look.

[JohnW]

escatesp -

Your site has indeed been removed from G index. I do not know what was in the tags you removed, but it must have been something G did not like. As for your site, G now sees it as a one page site with zero content. You might consider adding some html versions of all of your pages, and some html navigation, and then do a reinclusion request. I did not look at your links but Y says 500+. You might want to also make sure there are no fishy links there (farms, sitewides, other spammy stuff) before a reinclusion request is made.

[Escatesp]

Thank you, I'll do this. But what is what you say reinclusion request?

[sootledir]

Thank you, I'll do this. But what is what you say reinclusion request?

Say you're sorry for what you did, that you fixed it, and you wish to get back in.