Is it possible to contact google in person to understand why my site
went from a 5 to graybar?? I have a small business and was ranking for
months well on some key words, now I am ZERO.

I did send an email but I have had no response from google. As we all
know if people don't know about you they can't purchase from you.

Thanks

Peter

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Clarification of Question by peterp-ga on 05 Jan 2003 16:24 PST

The site is http://www.6sigma.us/

I have some manually added links and my site was listed on Jan 3 but not Jan 5.

Hi there,

There is only one email address for problems like yours:
help@google.com

You can probably imagine the number of queries from webmasters they
receive, so I would not expect an immediate reply.

The most likely reason why your site has lost its ranking is because
you have the same site duplicated at http://www.sixsigma.us/

I know that there can be genuine reasons for duplicating content,
however it doesn't help a web searcher much to have identical sites
appear in search results. It is therefore quite common for Google (it
probably happens automatically) to reduce the rank of one of the
sites. Google says this within their webmaster help pages:

Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially
duplicate content.
://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

This has been been discussed many times at WebMasterWorld, which is a
great resource for webmasters, and only requires free registration.

I am not sure that it has been totally penalised by Google as you show
grey bar and not a white bar, from what I have read here it just means
that Google has not indexed your site. After doing some checks, I
think that the page has been removed from the Google index because you
may have duplicated the page on another domain.
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/7685-2-15.htm

I recently had a domain get a greyed out PR due to near duplicate
content.
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/2293.htm

This Google search lists all the WebMasterWorld discussions on
"duplicate content" (372 results)
://www.google.com/search?q=+site:www.webmasterworld.com++google+%22duplicate+content%22


I hope this answers your question. If any portion of my answer is
unclear, please ask for clarification.


Best wishes,
robertskelton-ga

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Request for Answer Clarification by peterp-ga on 06 Jan 2003 00:57 PST

So what you are saying is that there is no way other than the email
that google people do not typically reply to to contact them? No phone
numbers. Nothing?

Seems like they are missing a revenue stream here. I am not really
sure what to do. I had no idea that having a back up site would ban me
from google. You are correct there are real reason to have back up
sites. I see many place have them.

1. I have been using the www.sixsigma.us site strictly for testing and
my email accounts. This allows me to measure hits more accurately and
success of any campaigns.  Since I do not have any links to the
www.sixsigma.us page, graying out the www.6sigma.us has killed my
ranking and likely my business.

2.The www.6sigma.us is in a windows server the other is on a unix. I
ran out of disk space on the windows box where www.6sigma.us is so I
linked the www.6sigma.us site to the www.sixsigma.us do download files
from. I want to move off the windows server since they charge too much
for disks space, but they offer some dynamic capabilities with their
website creation program.

3. Seems like google needs a system to allow for this. I am not
promoting via the web the back up site. I did notice it actually
gained a pagerank of 2 solely on the content of my site.

---

Request for Answer Clarification by peterp-ga on 06 Jan 2003 01:04 PST

Oh why would these people have the same problem?

http://www.bmgi.com/
http://www.bmgroup.com/

---

Clarification of Answer by robertskelton-ga on 06 Jan 2003 03:44 PST

Contacting Google
-----------------

The only official way is via their help email address. I have a
feeling that their email software might give higher priority to
someone who has emailed several times, which could denote a more
urgent or important query. (I'm totally guessing, but people who have
had results tend to mention sending more than one email).

Google's corporate contact page
://www.google.com/corporate/address.html

There is a discussion about shortcuts for contacting Google 1/4 of the
way down a page at the respected site Search Engine Watch:

"...web site owners wondering why their sites may not be listed are
instead supposed to use the help@google.com address.

The problem here is that Google does not respond to all the mail it
receives. There isn't time. Consequently, people may seek out help on
public forums or they may email anyone they think may help, which may
include their Google's ad reps."
http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/02/09-google.html

Paid support has been mentioned as desirable by a few webmasters, but
Google prefers to keep their services as free as possible. Visiting
public forums like WebMasterWorld is definitely recommended. Because
Google doesn't publish much detail on how their search engine works,
consensus of opinion is the best way to work it all out.


How to fix the problem
----------------------

1) At sixsigma.us create a text file called robots.txt and put this in
it:
 
User-agent: * 
Disallow: / 
 
This tells search engine robots like the GoogleBot to ignore this
site. More info about excluding robots:
http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/exclusion-admin.html 

2) Email Google and tell them what has happened and how you have fixed
it. This probably won't help things, but it is possible - and emails
are free.
 
3) Resubmit the URLs of both sites to Google: 
://www.google.com/addurl.html 

4) Wait a month or two.


Regarding bmgi and bmgroup
--------------------------

Many sites get away with using duplicate content. Some search engine
experts believe that Google looks at Whois records and IP addresses of
both sites to see if they match. I think it is more likely to be that
they just check small portions of the index each month, and it comes
down to luck. Supposedly when identical sites are found, Google keeps
the one with the most incoming links, but in my experience it seems to
be a 50/50 toss-up.

Robert did a good job answering and follwing up.