Why is this site banned from google?

[tryingtoseo]

Since the recent google update this website has suddenly gone missing from google : http://www.charming-paris.com

Previously when I would search for certain keywords, the site would show up in the top 20 and if I searched for www.charming-paris.com on google, I would see all the details and the cached version of the site. Now it shows nothing, as if the site had never been indexed.

It has done this for a month now and I can't figure out why google would ban it.

Will someone please help me?

[robwatts]

Hello just a few sugestions.

Have you or the owner spoke with the previous seo company? Maybe they can give you some background. Is it entirely coincendental that youve done this for a month and the sites been gone for a month?

If I were you I'd do a root and branch examination. Check your robots.txt, check for any noindex tags, check the httpd.conf file, check the .htaccess file. Someone could have been naughty and put something in one of these that said "hey google, bugger off"

Always best to assume the worst, as it wouldnt be the first time a website was the victim of some dirty tricks, so try and iron those out first.

You might want to check the cache of a few pages here and there on Yahoo or MSN. Does the cache match that of the page? Check for hidden divs, text and things like that.

Run the site through a browser like firefox using various useragents, see if it changes .Set the useragent to Googlebot, is there anything there for the bot? Maybe it has a noindex message?

Check the domain out in something like the waybackmachine, you will see a recent history of pages from the domain. This will enable you to check the history of a few pages and see what was actually done on the domain. You might find evidence of hidden text or hidden divs, that kind of thing.

Once youve gone through things that you can control, you then need to look at other things that you or a previous seo might have overdone.Things like similar domains, massive interlinking, keyword stuffing etc.Maybe you have other domains with similar content, maybe the SE's decided that one was sufficient perhaps.

Maybe youve been 302'd/hijacked. Check for various unique strings from your domain and see what appears in the serps. If you find a lot of sites that have your content on, then this could have affected you adversely. Check to see what type of linking scheme they are using.

If you are sure the site is 'clean' check to see who you link to, are you part of some big link farm for example?

If you are 100% sure that you or the previous seo haven't done anything that would be likely to raise a big red flag and the site is crystal clean, then drop google an email explaining the situation, maybe they can help.

Hope it works out.

[tryingtoseo]

Thanks very much for all the detailed suggestions. I have tried everything you suggested and these are the results:

Originally Posted by robwatts

Have you or the owner spoke with the previous seo company?

Yes and they have mentioned that google must have just missed out the page when it was last spidered, because maybe the site was down. But its been one month since then and they have submitted the site via google site maps and google has spidered other websites that link to our site many times this past month. So I'm quite worried now that something has gone wrong.

Originally Posted by robwatts

Is it entirely coincendental that youve done this for a month and the sites been gone for a month?

Im not sure I understand what you mean?
The seo company worked on the site in January. The site has disappeared from google since one month.

Originally Posted by robwatts

Check your robots.txt, check for any noindex tags, check the httpd.conf file, check the .htaccess file.

I checked all of the above and there is no problem there.

Originally Posted by robwatts

You might want to check the cache of a few pages here and there on Yahoo or MSN. Does the cache match that of the page? Check for hidden divs, text and things like that.

Both MSN and Yahoo dislayed recently cached versions of the site and there are no hidden elements.

Originally Posted by robwatts

Run the site through a browser like firefox using various useragents, see if it changes .Set the useragent to Googlebot, is there anything there for the bot? Maybe it has a noindex message?

I did this through the search engine spider emulator at http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/sim_spider.cgi and got a perfectly normal result.

Originally Posted by robwatts

Check the domain out in something like the waybackmachine, you will see a recent history of pages from the domain. This will enable you to check the history of a few pages and see what was actually done on the domain. You might find evidence of hidden text or hidden divs, that kind of thing.

There were no entries for 2005. Which is weird because the site was created in 2005.

Originally Posted by robwatts

Once youve gone through things that you can control, you then need to look at other things that you or a previous seo might have overdone.Things like similar domains, massive interlinking, keyword stuffing etc.Maybe you have other domains with similar content, maybe the SE's decided that one was sufficient perhaps.

We have very few (about 5-10) outbound links from the site. I don't think the SEO has keyword stuffed at all. The only similarity between this and my other site is that some of the 4 and 5 star hotels on here would also be listed on my generic paris hotels website: www.simply-paris.com

Originally Posted by robwatts

Maybe youve been 302'd/hijacked. Check for various unique strings from your domain and see what appears in the serps. If you find a lot of sites that have your content on, then this could have affected you adversely. Check to see what type of linking scheme they are using.

I couldn't find any domains with the same content as ours but when i searched for some unique phrases such as "Charming Paris provides a wide selection of luxury hotel" we got only affiliate-linking type of sites which didn't actually have that phrase anywhere in their visible content. I wonder if one of those could be a close immitation of our site and we cant see it.

Originally Posted by robwatts

If you are 100% sure that you or the previous seo haven't done anything that would be likely to raise a big red flag and the site is crystal clean, then drop google an email explaining the situation, maybe they can help.

As far as I can tell the site looks clean. But maybe I'm missing something. Should I go ahead and email google? If not is there any check or possiblities that I could investigate before trying to contact google?

P.S. what would be the best way to contact google for something like this?

[PhilC]

I have an idea, though it may not be right. It's an affiliate site for hotels - yes? I've assumed that because the booking process, for a random hotel that I chose, is provided by world-reserve and Holiday Bound.

Today I had reason to wonder if Google has tried to hit affiliate sites in the latest update. They are certainly known to be against them being in their serps, and I wonder if that might be the cause of your problem. If it is, and it is an affiliate site, it might goodnight Vienna.

[glengara]

FWIW, according to the monster update thread over at Webmasterworld, a lot of "no original content" affiliates were hit.

That site would fit the profile, but I can't remember if they were being de-indexed or simply fell.

[PhilC]

hehe...I came here today to see if anyone had any info or best guesses about what Bourbon did, because I was wondering about affiliate stuff. I'm loathe to go to WMW to find out what people are thinking because of what you said - monster threads. It would take a day or more to read through it all.

Thank for the info Glengara.

[robwatts]

Glengara PhilC >

I had a good read of those wmw threads saddo that I am, and from what I could tell, hit sites, were not de-indexed just deranked, at least that was my interpretation.

tryingtoseo>

If you have lots of other domains like h*tp://www.parischa...........tld url hidden to save potential future pain or the one you added in a subsequent post, that are not yet banned, then id strongly suggest you consider that SE reps may well on occassions, read these threads and act accordingly.

As PhilC and Glengara have pointed out, it could well have just been de-indexed, simply because its the type of domain that doesn't go above and beyond the standard datafeed format.

The days of throwing up a domain with a db and a webfeed and then expecting to make a nice few quid, are on their way out.

With regard to my comment

Have you or the owner spoke with the previous seo company? Maybe they can give you some background. Is it entirely coincendental that youve done this for a month and the sites been gone for a month?

I have known circumstances where past seo relationships have ended sorely and subsequent stone turning has shown that the prior seo had acted in a way that was less than helpful to the future of the domain. I wasn't suggesting that this is what had happened, I was simply saying that it could be something worth looking at, just in case.

A domain launched in 2005 is still a mere baby in the greater scheme of things, so it could even be the case that the index has flipped back to some old index, which doesnt include your domain, unlikely, but possible.

FWIW, I know first hand how much it sucks to see these things plummet or disappear. Sometimes they come back, and sometimes they don't, its a fact of life of free serpsville im afraid

[PhilC]

Originally Posted by robwatts

FWIW, I know first hand how much it sucks to see these things plummet or disappear. Sometimes they come back, and sometimes they don't, its a fact of life of free serpsville im afraid

I posted about that in an MSN thread - if, when we really don't know why it happened, and enough time has gone by that it's not going to recover, we just have to accept things as they are, and take it from there. It's part of the way the web and search engines work.

[dannysullivan]

This doesn't look to be a change in rankings impacting you. You simply aren't listed at all. You have no pages that I can find. PageRank meter also shows gray. It suggest that Google has penalized your site, for some reason.

I notice you look to be running another site targeting luxury hotels in paris under a different domain name -- in fact, with a different company listed despite both appearing to be registered to the same place. I won't list that on the offchance I've somehow gotten you confused with someone else.

The main point it -- if you're running multiple sites to target the same topics/terms, that's probably been spotted and may have resulted in a penalty. And to get out of that, you've got to clean up whatever you think is wrong and contact Google for reinclusion.

To contact them, email to webmaster@google.com with the subject line being "reinclusion request".

[dannysullivan]

Actually, it looks like that address might not work anymore. See http://www.scumware.com/apps/searche...ction::thread/.

Instead, try this form:
http://www.google.com/support/bin/re...type=webmaster

[janemc]

Originally Posted by PhilC

Today I had reason to wonder if Google has tried to hit affiliate sites in the latest update. They are certainly known to be against them being in their serps, and I wonder if that might be the cause of your problem. If it is, and it is an affiliate site, it might goodnight Vienna.

Very interesting! Our site
ProvenceBeyond.com was badly hit by Google changes in May. Although we have had thousands of pure information pages for many years, we have had - for about 2 years - affiliate relations with 2 hotel providers: Active Hotels in the UK and Venere in Italy. This now represents multiple hundreds of our pages. One of our affiliate providers led me to understand that many of their partners were hit by the last G changes. Sounds like you might be on to something re G and affiliates.

[robwatts]

Yes henk van ess put up some interesting documents that appear to endorse the view that aff sites that don't do very much were less than welcome.

Although, for many of the sites hit in this recent update, they haven't been de-indexed, most simply can't rank for anything. So maybe (making the wild and crazy assumption its algorithmic) someone over at the plex needs to tweak the algo a little.

Looking at janemc's site, it clearly has lots of good unique content and IMHO doesn't appear to deserve to be penalised or downgraded.

Europeforvisitors at wmw related similar difficulties during the early stages of the recent update, although, he did report that his site ranking returned during a latter stage.

Some posters there assumed that was due to a manual intervention of sorts, rather than a algorithmic shakedown, so I guess , if you seriously think that you've been hit unfairly, the thing to do is to use the url provided by Danny and hope they agree with your viewpoint.

[PhilC]

The reason that "I had reason to wonder if Google has tried to hit affiliate sites in the latest update" is because I also have a site that contains mostly unique content, but has had additional content from a hotels provider for a while. The site was all over the top of Google since Google began, but it was hit by Bourbon - much lower rankings (too low down to be useful), but not dropped. Most of the content is free/unique, but about 25% of it is affiliate hotels these days.

[glengara]

*Looking at janemc's site, it clearly has lots of good unique content..*

Not quite unique enough ;-)

http://www.provencebeyond.com/villag...elonnette.html

http://www.beyond.fr/villages/barcelonnette.html

[janemc]

Originally Posted by glengara

*Looking at janemc's site, it clearly has lots of good unique content..*

Not quite unique enough ;-)

http://www.provencebeyond.com/villag...elonnette.html

http://www.beyond.fr/villages/barcelonnette.html

There is only one physical site; the beyond.fr has been our URL for 10 years, and we added provencebeyond.com about 3/4 years ago in order to have a .com since it is English language. The .fr could give the misleading idea that the site is in French. Google gives beyond.fr as the root URL when you do a search on www.provencebeyond.com.
However, could this be causing a problem in anyone's opinion? (The provencebeyond.com is a 301 permanent redirect.)

[glengara]

*The provencebeyond.com is a 301 permanent redirect.*

Well I'm getting a 200 on both Urls, maybe somebody else might check.

[robwatts]

http://www.google.com/search?sourcei...cebeyond%2Ecom

25 results

Whereas the beyond.fr has inxs of 20k

Server Response: http://www.provencebeyond.com

HTTP/1.1 200 OK

Not a 301 in the sense that I understand one.

[janemc]

Originally Posted by robwatts

Not a 301 in the sense that I understand one.

Thanks very much for this, glengara and robwatts. I apparently have not understood how to do a 301 redirect. I'm going to look into it now.

[tryingtoseo]

Originally Posted by dannysullivan

I notice you look to be running another site targeting luxury hotels in paris under a different domain name -- in fact, with a different company listed despite both appearing to be registered to the same place. I won't list that on the offchance I've somehow gotten you confused with someone else.

The main point it -- if you're running multiple sites to target the same topics/terms, that's probably been spotted and may have resulted in a penalty. And to get out of that, you've got to clean up whatever you think is wrong and contact Google for reinclusion.

Are you referring to the www.luxury-...-....net website, because that was launched only a few weeks ago.

Sorry if I am confused, could you please private message me the site you were referring to so I can clear this mess up?

Thanks everyone for your helpful posts.

[glengara]

*.. so I can clear this mess up..*

Looking at the hotel sector always makes me dizzy ;-)