Hi,
Sorry to hear that you've lost your place on Google! Being one of the
last truly free search engines, it can be the only source of traffic
some business websites ever need.
Firstly, I should point out that the way Google works out listings is
neither simple nor guaranteed - sometimes sites can be dropped from
the index for no apparent reason, or lose rankings for reasons that
may not be obvious, and there may not be a specific reason that your
site no longer shows up.
Secondly, I think I should clarify the number of links situation. You
said that there were over 500 quality links the last time you checked.
I thought the best way to check this would be to look for how many
sites contained the name of your site anywhere on there pages. I did
this by looking for the phrase
"http://www.home-loans-n-mortgage.com/". This search returned just
over 340 results. This in itself should mean that Google would really
link your site - seeing as it crawls the internet by following one
link to another, it would come across your site often, and see it as
an important site. However, by clicking through to the end of the
results pages, I was able to see how many of these links Google thinks
are from sites of importance. Alarm bells rang when I saw that of the
340 links, Google only saw 23 of them as valuable, with the telling
message "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have
omitted some entries very similar to the 23 already displayed". this
means that you have lots of links from sites too similar to each other
for Google to display. Already, your site is in danger of being
labelled as a spam site.
Let me explain this a little. More and more, search engines are having
to find new ways to judge the quality of the pages they return in
search results, in order to eliminate junk pages with no content, that
are becoming increasingly common. In order to decide which pages to
keep and which ones to throw out, they have to come up with ways of
judging what good pages have in common, and what bad pages have in
common. Spammers go to great lengths in order to push their pages into
search engine indices, and one of their favoured techniques is known
as 'link farming'. This is where you make a large amount of identical
or very similar pages that link to your site, and put as many of them
on the internet as you can. By exchaning pages with like-minded
webmasters, it's possible to build up an awesome amount of links into
your site. This technique was extremely successful up until a few
years ago, when search engines started to compare pages, and throw out
any that were too similar. Google has become very refined at this
process.
If there are 340 links to your site, but google only rates 23 of them,
you are in danger of being seen as a spam site, even if your not.
Now, link farming is just one technique that can get you banned from
Google, or any other search engine, for instance www.alltheweb.com,
which maintains an extensive banned list. I took a closer look at
http://www.home-loans-n-mortgage.com/ to see if you had fallen foul of
any of the other potential danger areas. By dragging the mouse over
the text on the page, I discovered that you had some text written in
the same colour as the background of your table cell. It reads "Home
laons at great rates". There's a typo in there, so it doesn't seem
link ypou intended to hide the text. But this is quite serious -
writing text in the same colour as the background of your page is a
cardinal sin as far as search engines are concerned - it was a
favoured technique (still is) amongst adult webmasters a few years
ago, because it worked. The search engines got wiser, and now any kind
of hidden text can land you in hot water. Put simply, what search
engines will see and what your visitor see will not be the same, and
if a search engine picks up on this, it can assume that you are trying
to 'trick' them into ranking your page higher, and exclude you from
their index.
All this added up could mean that Google has decided to ban your page
- fingers crossed that it hasn't because there is no guarantee that it
will include you again if you have been banned, and the only solution
might be to get a new domain name and start again.
However, all is not doom and gloom, because there are a number of
steps you can take to get your site back into Google, or at the very
least to build up your sites reputation with the search engine again.
The first, and debatably the most important step in promoting your
site on the internet, is to submit to the Open Directory via Dmoz.org.
Submission is free, but getting into the Open Directory practically
guarantees that Google will include your site - since the directory is
human edited, run by volunteers and also forms the basis of Google's
own directory results, this is viewed as a link of the highest quality
to your site. I notice that neither of your sites are listed.
Secondly, if you can afford it, you should submit your sites to Yahoo,
which is also viewed as a very important link. These 2 steps alone
ensure your site that your site will be crawled by Google, even if you
have no other incoming links. If Google thinks your site is spam,
however, it will still not index your site, even with these links
That said, If your site has been banned, taking these 2 steps will not
help you to get back into Google, so I would wait at the very least
one month to see if Google reindexes your site – there are links to
your site, so Google will follow them. In the meantime, make sure you
get rid of the hidden text on your pages, and make sure that any links
to your site are in pages that are already in the Google index, and
which are also related services to those offered on your site. This
will ensure Google sees them as valuable links.
It is extremely unlikely that a competitor has succeeded in getting
your site banned. There are very limited things that a rival can do
because, at the end of the day, it is the content on your own site
that determines it’s worth.
I hope this has helped clear up your situation – if you require any
sort of clarification, please let me know. This is a very complex
subject with no simple explanation, and I am more than happy to give
you some more advice if you need it.
Good luck getting your sites back into Google!
Internet Links:
Checking links:
://www.google.com/search?q=link:www%2Ehome%2Dloans%2Dn%2Dmortgage%2Ecom
://www.google.com/search?q=link:www.mortgageleadsgeneration.com
General advice:
http://www.webmasterworld.com
Submissions:
http://dmoz.org/add.html
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/ |
