My website in its present form was on Google and related search
engines for 5 or 6 months until about 10 days ago when it was
unaccountably dropped by them. I have read Google's notes and found I
am guilty of a nominal amount of hidden text, which I intend removing
but according to expert advice this on its own would not get me
dropped. WebPosition has also told me that their software that does
ranking searches can cause a problem. There seems to a multiplicity of
possibilities many of which I am aware of; so what I am looking for is
not possible causes but to be told what alterations I should make to
my site to get it reinstated without changing my URL. I have
resubmitted my site and I have also written to Google but, in
accordance with their notes, no advice seems to be forthcoming. My
website address is www.chinese-porcelain-art.com

Hi, 

I've seen this happen with a lot of websites that try these tactics.
Its unfortunate, and there is no real "quick fix" Quick fix is what
did this in the first place. But, here is what you do to get it on
Google again and several other search engines that have probably taken
you out of the index as well.

First off, make a file called robots.txt. This should be a plain text
file and have a single line in it (for you anyway) That line should
be:

User-agent: *

This lets all robots know that its okay to index your site. You don't
have one and google will drop on this as well. No space at the top,
and plain, regular text. Put this in the main area of your site. Check
that it is readable by going to the file using
http://yoururl.com/robots.txt. You should be able to read it. If not,
then try again using plain text. Don't put anything in there except
that line.

Next, take out the two lines you have of hidden text. Since you used
that term I'm going to assume you know what that is, and then remove
those Spam comments you are using as well.

Next, remove the in-body JavaScript you have at the bottom. The
counter isn't working anyway, and its a redirect from your site. Until
you get back on to the search engines, don't put anything in there
that is not of your website, and no javascript that is not working
correctly.

Next, your keywords are too long. A good rule to follow is no more
than 10, and the sets of no more than two. Trust me, more than this is
not doing you any good. The engines do not rely completely on the
keywords any longer, mostly because of exactly this type of tactic you
are using. Use the keyword tag, don't rely on it.

Make sure that in "visible" text each of your key word sets are being
used on the page they are on. If they aren't then they aren't going to
be used in the indexing anyway. More than this, they will count
against you.

Next, if you have other registered urls that are redirecting to this
site, stop them. At least until you are back on the engines. This is
not the same as linking to this site. A redirect is when I go to that
URL and my browser is sent to this page instead. Put text and
information on those sites. Use them as "interesting facts on
ceramics" or "The history of ceramics." Give them all robot.txt files
and follow the other instructions as well. Put a link to this site on
those. ONE.

Next, check each page to make sure there are no broken links. 

Next, do all of this for the rest of the pages on the website. 

Next, get from your ISP, if it is not available to you, an access_log
file and see how often the google robot has come by your website. It
will not be a set time period, and since you have been dropped, it may
be longer before it comes back around. Check this file regularly to
see when it does show up. Then check your status again.

For a small site it sure breaks a lot of the current basic rules..
Don't worry about it too much, its not unfixable. In the future, be
aware that quick fixes in this area usually are not. The Engines,
(Google and others) work very hard for accuracy from queries. That is
what they are selling, so they read the same stuff the "marketing"
people are. Make your site is easy to index, keep it clean and useful
and your listing will be reinstated and you'll go higher on results
page.

There is nothing wrong with JavaScript or marketing or cgi's. Nothing
at all. Make sure they work though. This type of thing can happen
because by poorly written code "trapping" the spider when it comes to
your site. Test all code thoroughly before putting it on your website.
And if it is not working, get it off there as soon as possible.

Thanks, and good luck. 

webadept-ga

The real answer to my question was obtained from a Google discussion
group by a friend who received the answer as follows:
I have some great news about your website. I posted a question on a
specialist Google forum asking why it has been banned. I got 45
responses! A few were from an employee of Google who moderates the
forum. This is one of his responses:

 

‘Hey Neil, were you using WebPosition Gold for this domain until
recently? Looks like that's what did it for you. I'll re-enable your
domain and you should be back in within a day or so. Please help
spread the word that rank checking programs can lead not just to IPs
being banned but trouble for domains as well. We did another pass to
turn off a chunk of domains that use rank checking programs recently.’

 

So it looks like Web Position Gold was the reason why you were banned.
As there was clearly no foul play involved Google are going to re-list
your site hopefully by the end of the day. It seems they don’t like
people using WPG as it slows google down a bit.

 

Another interesting point was raised in the forum – how does google
stop people using WPG on their competitors to get them banned? They
also check the IP address of the computer where WPG is being run from,
so they know if you’re actually checking your own domain or a
competitor.

 

 

Regards,

 

Neil Hutchinson

I did point out in my question I was aware of the basic rules and was
seeking a solution and in fact the recommended action although sound
did not offer the solution. No one who had looked at my site  thought
I had done anything seriously wrong although there was room for
improvement.

I looked at your site and the word porcelain occurs 61 times, so
'maybe' that is too much, (counting every instance). Off topic, I
noticed you are not listed in dmoz.org (provides google's directory
content) or alltheweb.com both free listings, so you may want to be
listed there too.

When you do the Google search on pages containing links to your site

"+www.chinese-porcelain-art.com" +".com"

you get 111 results but only two sites:

www.ks-creations.co.uk/cv.html 

and

www.lastoria.org/nicola2/arte-linx.htm 

I've never seen that result before - could there have been an attempt
to Google Bomb your site with one-way links?

Rankings on Google are definitely one of the most difficult to fool
into giving you high rankings or having webmaster easily color it's
results. That is of course why so many people use it to search because
it's results are very relevant and usually point to the best sites for
keywords. But this also means that you have to make a site become an
authority on a topic to make it rank high and also to make it stay in
the database. Often they will add sites that have some linkings to
them to try them out in the database for a while. No one but their
search engine result engineers are sure of what the algorithm is doing
during this time but one thing is certain. Just because you get in
does not mean you will stay in. I would say that something on the site
did not meet ongoing criteria to stay in and then to rank highly for
"chinese poreclain art" or other keywords. On sites for my clients I
have seen them added then removed a few weeks later without links from
important sites such as DMOZ or Yahoo. Yahoo is now $299 US for most
categories but you should research that and see what category(s) would
be best for it. Then after the client has been in Yahoo or other big
directory sites for a while they are listed in Google again the next
time they refresh their database. Again, this is a kind of checksum,
to see that at least several sites think your site is of high merit
for Google to list your site. The sites linking to you now have decent
page ranks (PR), they have a 3 and 4 ranking. A good directory should
have a higher ranking than those and the more the merrier.

For more information on Page Ranking please see Google at:
://www.google.com/technology/

 Good Luck!

search terms on Google

pagerank
page rank

Oddly enough, one of my websites which has been up since 1996 was
dropped from Google on Friday and restored on Sunday - the usage stats
tell the story. I don't know if Google fixed the problem within
minutes of my e-mailing them when I noticed, or if it was some
temporary glitch.

morris-ga

Oops, sites were only back in Google on some servers as the drop
propagated through the system. Checking with Google, hope to be able
to clarify the drop process for all.

OK, while I haven't heard back from Google yet, by looking at which
pages on my site hadn't been dropped, I was able to figure out how the
dropped ones were "chosen" for the honor. A few months ago, I went
from using an image map for our homepage, http://www.daileyint.com to
a simple list of links to most of the pages on the site. Ironically, I
did this after reading up on things Google doesn't like, and image
maps is one of them. The problem was that all of our documents were in
sub-directories, and I forgot whether or not a "/" was required before
each link in the HTML, as in "/build/index.htm" or "build/index.htm."
Rather than experimenting,  I did the safe thing and used an old
index.htm which had the whole URL for each entry, as in
"http://www.daileyint.com/build/index.htm". Unfortunately, Googlebot
must have seen the links as a problem and removed all of the pages
directly referenced from the Google index. I don't understand why, it
wasn't an attempt to spam the index, they obviously originated in the
domain they pointed at..

If anybody wonders why I'd have an old index around which used the
whole URL, it's because the site dates back to 1996. Both my business
partner and I were on 14K modems, FTPing our pages up independently,
and we didn't want to have to replicate the whole site on both of our
PCs. Using the full URL allowed the web mapping tool in GNN Press
(which I still use) to work without the pages being present on the
local PC.

Moral of the story is to use all local (relative) links if you don't
want your pages dropped by Google.