Released on: March 18, 2008, 2:34 am

Press Release Author: Prakash Sharma

Industry: Education

Press Release Summary: The date: 29th July 2005. The time: early morning. I got out
of bed and fired up my PC. Opened my browser to check my site. Had a look at the
third-party Google toolbar plug-in (http://toolbar.google.com/) on said browser
(FireFox). It showed grey.Ice formed in my stomach.

Press Release Body: The date: 29th July 2005. The time: early morning. I got out of
bed and fired up my PC. Opened my browser to check my site. Had a look at the
third-party Google toolbar plug-in (http://toolbar.google.com/) on said browser
(FireFox). It showed grey.

Ice formed in my stomach. I opened my bugged version of Internet Explorer: my
PageRank was 0. By now I was frantic. I went to http://www.google.com and typed in
\'site: www.tigertom.com’: no pages listed. I did this for two other satellite sites
of mine: ditto.

What had happened?

TigerTom.Com (http://www.tigertom.com) had been banned by Google. I went to the
WebmasterWorld forum (http://www.webmasterworld.com), and found out the awful truth.
Google was doing one of its periodic updates of its algorithm, and had filtered out
my sites completely.

Further research there and a bit of soul-searching, revealed why. I had too many
pseudo-directory pages with auto-generated external links. Snippets from search
engine results were used as descriptions of said links. Said links were run though a
redirect script. These are hallmarks of pseudo-directories and \'AdSense scraper\'*
sites. Google is reportedly trying to filter these from its \'SERPs\'**. I say
reportedly, because Google doesn\'t announce these purges. They are inferred.

To compound my sins, these pages were also effectively doorway pages†.

The theory was that legitimate sites had been hit as \'collateral damage\'. I say
theory, in that Google rarely comments on individual cases. It won\'t tell you
exactly why your site was banned. I guess this is for reasons of time, and to give
no clues to spammers.

In my case the ban was justified for my two satellite sites; while not looking like
spam, they were effectively doorway sites.

My main site was different. It had offending pages, but was mostly a diverse labour
of seven years; a personal site on steroids.

Google bans sites algorithmically: a site that fits their \'spammer\' profile gets
dropped via software from their index automatically. Real spammers shrug their
shoulders and move on; honest webmasters write emails begging for mercy.

Like me.

I did some searching via Google, to find out how to do a re-inclusion request.
Here\'s how:

1. First, you check your site is truly gone, by going to http://www.google.com,
typing \'site:www.yourdomain.com\' without the apostrophes. If it returns no pages at
all ...

2. You check Google\'s webmaster guidelines at
http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html. These are not really guidelines;
you should treat them as iron-clad rules.

3. You stop the offending content from being web-accessible, permanently.

If you\'re familiar with Apache web-server mod_rewrite you can:

- Send a 410 \'Gone\' response to requests for the offending pages, or
- CHMOD them to 600, which will return a 403 \'Forbidden\' response, or
- Move them to a different directory if you need to keep them, or
- Just delete them.

Don\'t try to be clever. Just get rid of them.

4. You go to http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py, tick the relevant boxes,
and type \'Re-inclusion request\' in the subject box of the form.

4a. You add the complete URL of your site i.e. http://www.naughtydomain.com,

4b. You state that you have read the webmaster guidelines above,

4c. You admit what you did wrong; simply, succinctly, with no carping or special
pleading.

Don\'t try to be clever. Don\'t argue. Don\'t lie. Don\'t waffle.

Google has cached copies of your site. When an engineer checks your site, he\'ll look
for the offending content, and compare it against their cache. He\'ll spend about two
minutes on it; don\'t give him a reason to continue to exclude you.

5. You ask for re-inclusion.

6. You wait.

In my case, it took about a week; a long, unpleasant, fretful week. I sent follow up
emails saying what I was doing, and a fax, and I was going to write letters if that
didn\'t work. That was probably excessive. Once you have a ticket number, that\'s all
that should be necessary.

They emailed a standard reply saying \"the problem had been passed to their
engineers\". That\'s good. I understand they send no reply to spammers.

A week later my site was back in. Lesson learnt. To make sure I\'m not so vulnerable
again, I\'m splitting my content to different sites, on the principle of \'best not to
have all your eggs in one basket\'.

Have I learnt anything from this? Yes. Have more than one site as your
\'money-maker\'. Spend less time on search engine optimization and more on traditional
marketing. Come up with a unique selling proposition that compels people to link to
your site. Easy(!)



Web Site: http://www.greateducationonline.com

Contact Details: nanak1040@gmail.com,Prakash Sharma,S.C.O. 90, Sec.35/C
Chandigarh,chandigarh,160019,