Why is my website http://www.swingmusic.net no longer listed in the
Google engine? It was 3rd under swing music radio shows just a couple
days ago

Hi jazzjester-ga,

Google has a page that answers this question in detail.
://www.google.com/webmasters/2.html

If it's simply an indexing phenomenon there isn't much you can or need
to do.

However, if you were near the top of your category and are now not
listed at all, it seems possible that something more serious may be
wrong.

One reason for removal from the search engine would be a copyright
infringement claim.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/2910195.htm

The Peggy Lee tribute pages that you link to are not found when you
click thorough. Could it be that these generated a DMCA complaint?
http://www.clickz.com/article.php/1014461

In any case, you should have been - or will be notified by Google. You
have the option of filing a counter complaint to restore the pages
back to the original status if the problem is DMCA related.
://www.google.com/dmca.html

I also checked your source code and noticed that you include the meta
tag "keywords" twice on all of your pages. Was this a recent change?

Doing things like that are often simple mistakes, but may be seen as
trying to "spam" a search engine and will get your site unlisted
pretty quickly.

Try going into your code and removing one of the sets of keywords. 

Another hint... If you use commas between your keywords you limit the
searches to the phrase contained in the commas. If you list with just
a space between words you allow the words to be searched and it can be
more powerful.

swingmusic.net,buy Swing Music CD's,classic jazz,jazz vocalists,lindy
hop,jitterbug,swing dance,big band era,swing era,swing music...

could be 
swingmusic.net buy Swing Music CD classic jazz vocalists lindy hop
jitterbug swing dance big band era music...

Many search engines have a limited number of characters that they will
look at when searching keywords. Usually around 200-250 is a good
number. Removing the commas gives you added space to put words.
Repeating those words in the title and in the text on the page gives
more weight to the terms.

On your keywords, if I did a search for swing dance era, I'd get a
match for swing dance but the relevance would be lower because you
missed matching one term - era. If you take the commas out you match
all three words. If someone searches for the phrase "swing dance"
including the quotes in the search, you win with the commas because
you have that exact phrase. The question is...how many people do you
know who search for quoted phrases? Most people just type in the words
that they're looking for.

Try changing your code to just one set of keywords to clean up the
spam issue and try taking the commas out on one of the pages to see if
it increases the number of times that the page gets hit.

http://www.promotionbase.com/article/936
Has a good discussion of what can get you removed and how to fix the
problem and get relisted.

Search terms used:
removal of site from google
removal of site from google for spamming
disputing removal of site from google

Hope this helps,
bcguide-ga

---

Request for Answer Clarification by jazzjester-ga on 15 Nov 2002 21:31 PST

Thanks for this reply. I have taken out the extra set of meta tags and
title. I didn't realize using the tool that I did that both would show
up twice. Regarding the placement of meta tags without commas I have a
question and/or concern. While using Submitit.net and checking keyword
density with the commas removed the tool shows I have no matches,
density, or results. I have seen the reccomendation elsewhere to leave
out commas but why does the tool not pick them up. Regarding the Peggy
Lee tribute pages, it is actually audio that is linked only to real
player through a helix server http address. It plays fine on both my
computers but with real audio player. I haven't figured out how to get
WMP to work with the Helix server yet but supposedly it will. It seems
unlikely the problem is DCMA related in that the audio was initially
broadcast over the net and broadcast band and produced by me. I'm
betting on the problem being with the dual titles and mets tags. Plus
I found a site using a link to a former geocities site before I
migrated and had them update. I couldn't find any info on how to
remove a submission and apparently geocites continues to mirror my
paid site with the former freebie host. I have also been removed from
Yahoo's engine I just noticed today. Hopefully everything is up to
snuff now. Any feedback is appreciated. Jeff P jazzjester@attbi.com

---

Clarification of Answer by bcguide-ga on 16 Nov 2002 12:59 PST

Hi,

It's hard to double check every detail every time you redo a page. You
tend to trust the tools you work with not to cause problems with
search engines. Sadly, there's still no substitute for the human brain
:-)

Removing the double keyword entries should clear up the problem.
Before you go crazy trying to configure the keyword tags just right
you might want to read an article on the death of meta tags on search
engine watch (a very good site for search engine indexing info)-
http://www.searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/meta.html

The search engine submission software you use may not recognize the
keywords without commas because it wasn't programed for that. Search
engines are constantly upgrading and changing their approach to what
gets high ranking.

The concept is - a search engine is a business. They are in the
business of providing relevant sites for you when you enter in the
terms - key words - you are looking for. In order to keep their
customers they must provide a cleaner result than anyone else.

Do you remember the days when almost any search would turn up a mish
mosh of sites that had nothing to do with what you needed? The goal of
the search engine is to keep that from happening.

As search engines perfect ways to get the most relevant sites to rise
to the top, web designers devise ways to get the search engines to
recognize their site as the best. One way to do that is to spend
weeks/months/years building the best source of information on your
topic and more weeks/months/years promoting it to other related sites
to get lots of external links. That's a lot of effort with no
guarantees.

The easier way is to find out what the search engines use for criteria
and spam them. Trick them into thinking that the content on your site
is chock full of information that the customers want to see.

In the perfect world, this would never happen. In the [virtual] real
world it happens all the time. That means that people who really do
have good sites with lots of relevant information get bumped down on
the list to make way for crappy sites that know how to play the search
engine game.

So the good sites have to learn how to play the game too - and time
that could be spent deveoping your resource is spent revising keywords
and strategizing to get good search engine placement.

The search engines are on the side of the good guys - they want the
best sites to be at the top in a search and they want to penalize the
spammers for adding keyword to their site and cheating in other ways.
But since we all need to compete with the spammers - we get caught in
between.

If external links are the key - set up free link pages and submit to
millions of them and presto - you have tons of external links. The
search engine realizes that this is not working and decides that they
need to exclude pages that contain only links - because - remember -
it's their job to give the customer the best sites when they enter a
few key words.

Embedded text helps boost rankings - so people figure out that adding
keywords in the same color as the background will fool the search
engines into thinking that the terms are really present in the
information on the page. The search engines realize this and ban sites
that contain same color background and text.

Keywords become the standard so people pack the meta tag with the same
word repeated forty times. They go right to the top, but searchers are
not happy that the key words they entered are returning garbage, so
the engines add loading keywords to the spam that gets you booted off
their listings.

As soon as search engines get a good formula, someone figures out a
way to get around it and use it to boost the rank of their pages...
and the search engine formulas change to prevent that... and someone
figures out the new formula... and so on and so on...

I still use keywords. You never know which way the wind will blow and
they may become important again. I wouldn't want to have to go back
through every page and insert keywords again. The same goes for the
title. Right now description and the text are most important to search
engine indexing. Make sure to use the keywords liberally - in context
- in your page. In theory, if you are providing a deep resource on a
topic, the keywords will naturally be repeated often - look at how
many times the terms search engine and keywords are repeated in this
clarification.

You have a really good site (I like jazz and that makes it even
better!) so you probably already know most of this. I'd add some (not
much - the design would suffer) descriptive text under the links to
increase the frequency of key words in your text and rewrite the
titles to reflect more keywords - not a high priority right now - but
who knows what tomorrow may bring. Otherwise, you're doing a great job
- as you know from your high ranking before the calamity ;-)

As far as getting reinstated on Yahoo - I'd write to Yahoo! customer
care - they have a submission form that you can find at the bottom of
this page:
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/url/url-27.html
The editors at Yahoo! have a reputation of being reasonable and
helpful, just explain the problem and request that the site be
reinstated.

As far as the geocities site goes, I'd just make it a doorway. Add
some nice info making sure that it is NOT a duplicate of your main
site and let it link to you. You don't care about the search engine
placement since most of the search engines won't list freebie sites
like geocities. It won't help much in terms of weight of the link, but
it won't hurt as long as it is not a duplicate of your site.

Hope this much too long clarification helps a little :-)
bcguide-ga