All these shops are with the same shop provider and they were all excluded on the same day.
Our shop provider formed a re-inclusion request, and begged for dialog, as they have not had success with the framed guidelines. It's almost the entire webshop industry of a small country that is somewhat affected by this discussion, so I'm hoping you will give it a few minutes.
My shop was reincluded two days later (on December 8, I think), but now without any products. Can you tell me if a penalty is what standing in the way of indexing. My site is easily crawlable and my webshop is serious. This is my living, so if you sense emotion in my posts, then .. I'm only human.
Hundreds of similar shops at the same provider continue to work. For example, we lost all Christmas sales to our competitor.
I am communicating with our web-shop provider as well, and I have them standing by should I manage to get some information that can help us. If you could e-mail, I would kiss you!
We all log in regulary to check for any signs of anything that will allow us to continue our business - or give us a hint about what the trouble with our sites are.
I'm logged into my webmaster tools right now. I see nothing about exclusion or any mention of penalties.
When I see no mention of penalties in there, does that mean that there are none (behind the scenes)? I.e. can what we see in the user-interface be considered authoritive?
If there was a specific penalty, how would something like that look? Would it be visible only as an exclusion or could there be details? I did study Matt's videos, in which he mentions that in most cases google will be able to communicate violations directly to the webmasters, but it kind of doesn't mention where and I haven't heard examples of it in here. Can you shed light?
In conclusion, can I relax now and feel confident that Google isn't somehow remembering something behind the scenes, which is why I only have 6 out of thousands of pages indexed?
A couple of days ago Google did something that affected as far as I know and have seen, all web sites in Scandinavia. My daughter owns a dog site and it was sent into oblivion the other day. She used to get a couple of hundred visitors every day from Google but after their change she's getting none and it hurts her business. Like everybody have seen that gets hit by Googles updates, they don't really care because we are too small to care about, even in times like these (x-mas!) If we were Amazon.com, then there would have been no changes that close small online shops that work for their livelyhood. Why even bother emailing Google and complain? Filling in forms and stuff? Why don't they just have a "quick reply" to the forms we fill in saying the same as the canned emails we get back? This is rediculous. I posted somehwre else that I see millions on link spammers in the search results so I guess white hat is not an option anymore?
It looks like a lot of the pages are in the supplimental index. I have had my pages drop off the Google charts before so I understand how you feel. I don't think Google is currently penalizing the entire region of Scandinavia. I could be wrong as I am not an authority here.
Are you sure there isn't something you have done recently to the site which might have affected it's rankings? The site contains approximately 39,000 thousand pages and it appears that most pages has content which is very similar to other pages in the same domain.
Perhaps Google has recently tightened is policy on the amount of unique, relevant content required on a page and perhaps you were very close to crossing that threshold before the change. I do not know enough about upgrades to Google software upgrades to be able to tell you if in fact there has been a change.
Bollocks. Google has done NOTHING that affected "all sites in Scandinavia" - if it did something like that it would make the television news all over Europe.
It's more likely that it spotted your duplicate content and devalued the site as a consequence:
A site with a violation will have a message that's something like "this site is not currently indexed due to violations of the webmaster guidelines" and it will include a link to the reinclusion request form.
The message that just says no pages are currently indexed doesn't point to a penalty. When I get back into the office, I'll look into this issue that some of you have mentioned of seeing this message incorrectly.
Does this message occur in every member's page that owns a website that has a current violation? I'm not in to SEO as much as I should be, but remember reading that this type of notification and message was only being displayed to selected sitemap members; has this now changed?
Many thanks for the link, I have just read throught it - I would like to ask though, what would happen if you have a website that is geared around the use of spelling mistakes - a bargain finder website if you will. This could be for finding bargains on creaigslist, ebay, etc.. Obviously the keywords for the website would be mispelled, and also I am presuming, the keyword in any descriptive text would too, but at the same time, I am sure it would be spelt right as well, there would probably be a mixture.
But if your site was designed around this idea, would you still get penalized, I read in the article that you linked too that there is no intention to notify members of this type of penalisation, as this is spamming?
"On the other hand, if the webspam team detects a spammer that is creating dozens or hundreds of sites with doorway pages followed by a sneaky redirect, there's no reason that we'd want the spammer to realize that we'd caught those pages. So Google clearly shouldn't contact every site that is penalized-it would tip off spammers that they'd been caught, and then the spammers would start over and try to be sneakier next time."
My shop provider had created hundreds of "doorway" pages, to present framed content more appropriately to Google, and on each of these pages (at least for a period) there was a redirect to the same page within the framed site. Might this in fact that triggered this penalty that is preventing indexing of my pages and yet doesn't show up in my webmaster console. It sounds plausible to me, but it is a theory (which maybe you can check for when in the office).
Other people tell me to remove the robots.txt that is preventing the indexing of framed pages.
Others tell me it's all because of dynamic pages. Others tell me a session cookie check might have done it, others tell me it's W3C validation that's my problem, others tell me it's the limited duplicate content that almost similar products result in, etc, etc. I'd like to just address it all, but as long as I don't have a single product online - I think there are some much bigger problems. Others tell me nothing is wrong and that I just have to wait. I'm afraid and I'd at this point, I need solid data.
Actually, by hiding the frames that users see from Google, I feel I'm deceiving Google and placing my business in the danger-zone of a penalty.
These darn work-arounds in trying to satisfy both the users and Google. Listening too much to any advice here is a bit like tilting against a windmill, which is why I've so desperately begged Google to give my case a more careful analysis and help put us shops back in the direction (in the present context and without me and staff having to lose everything we have worked for). My eyes are pinned at Google, in a hope that a solution will be reached.
In the early summer 2007, all frames should be gone, and then it's a new situation that I can handle on my own. Until then, the frames are in the way and no matter how I turn this around, it doesn't seem fair to lose a business because of a framed site that when I joined in, had no problems with Google.
That a framed site is really tough to get working well with Google is underscored by Google telling us to flat-out drop them. Just doesn't seem right that I, in my position, shall have such an amazing limitation put on me by the search engine - when I can reda in all Google blogs that we are told to focus on our core business and our users. "Focus on the users and the rest will come" (one of Google's 10 founding principles). I can take a hint though, and as said, the shop provider is working on a non-framed model of their shop. I've been promissed to be the first one to beta test it - but it's a live shop I have, and if it continues to look bad, the suppliers will drop me next. Getting these suppliers is something we used 1.5 years doing.
The shop owner has made different solutions available for its customers to pick from, and they really (don't feel that they) can be held responsible by its users for a big area like Google. You probably know how easy it is to use all your time on Google, and if it's not your core business - then you are in trouble. You won't ever get it completely right, which is part of the charm.
The shop provider is hesitant to change a system that works acceptable for hundreds, in favor of new tests which can put them out of business, if they hit one of the trip-wires.
It's really not an easy situation. Had it been my own shop system, then I would have gone static long ago, but you don't just change a shop system that has been perfected for customers throughout the last 10 years (the feature list and the number of modules created for this shop is mile-long).
Google can probably easily see that these shops I've listed are ALL legid and that we have no interest in spamming. Everything revolves around getting these darn frames to work, while not keeping our users away from the pages that are intented for them. When I joined the shop provider they didn't have a single problem with Google, so I feel I've been somewhat lured into this unfortunate situation - which is hard to get out of.
I've tried to be strong and responsible - and take matters in my own hand here. I think it was the right thing to do, but just be happy you aren't feeling like I'm feeling. It's been difficult to enjoy anything for past 21 days, seeing everything I've worked for slowly slipping between my fingers. I can get a ton of friends to sympathise with me, but at this point, only Google can really help me.
Our shop provider, while interested in Google (who isn't), aren't experts. They are at the mercy of who they take advice from, and as Bud mentioned, it's often a blind leading a blind. I can't go back to my shop provider and ask them to follow advice from me that isn't better than what they have received before. Also, I've passed Google the e-mail address of my shop-provider, in case they would rather deal with them directly.
As it is now, after 21 days of full-time involvement in this, in order to save my private venture, I've gotten the shop provider to listen to me good and Google has promissed to check our sites, so we can hopefully get back to a safe solution, with no unfair penalties.
I'm currently waiting eagerly for Google to get back to me.
