Search Engine Solutions Blog

Susan: Banned by Google. No idea why. It’s been banned for nearly a year.
I’ve owned … since about 2000. I did a few pet events and advertised mostly through traditional advertising “not online”. The site was indexed then. Then I stopped doing anything with … and it parked for about a year (with Sedo or some other 3rd party company - can’t really remember which one).

I brought it back online and made it an affiliate sales type of site, and it was still indexed in Google. But out of the blue it became unindexed. I then changed the site layout by making it a blog with all of the affiliate type stuff on the back pages.

My only SEO efforts have been to have it submitted to directories. Other than that, I really haven’t done anything with it. Which is why I’m so puzzled as to why it became unindexed.

Any ideas?

Thanks for your help.

Martin: Hi Susan,

I have checked your site, and indeed you’re banned from Google but not from MSN and not from Yahoo!
You did few mistakes causing to have poor ranking on MSN & Yahoo though and to not be forgivable by Google as they’re just too tough.

Please tell me:

When exactly did you “brought it back online”?

Susan: Hi Martin,

I know I’m banned, I just don’t know why.

I’m not exactly sure when I made the site active again. Probably about 2 years ago.
I did a lot of directory listings. I know these type of links don’t add a lot to a web site but I didn’t think they would negatively effect the domain. According to Google I have about 179 links that go to …com.

Here are some of the directories I submitted to ( if you type search …com on google you will see a lot of them):

seo-friend.com
aaawebdirectory.com
directory.searchwarp.com
viesearch.com
hlnk.com
abigdir.com

The affiliate sites were all pet related sites that I joined in Commission Junction. Sites like animalden.com, petsmart.com, and sitstay.com.

Thanks for your help.

Sincerely, Susan

Martin: Susan,
These days Google very much care on your SEO tempo (one day, I will write a blog post about this…). You can’t get hundreds of links out of the blur especially from sites that are banned themselves (!) or sites that are related to SEO. Google is not stupid.

CJ is the best affiliate program, no problem with them.

Okay. I can try to take you out of banning if it worth you 4 hours of my time. It can take something from 3 weeks to 3 months to put you back on Google.

Yes, take this free tip: Ask the directories above to move your listing out right away.

Hope it helps.

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Sherry: Currently, we have a very limited budget… We recently hired a company to assist us with our site/Yahoo store - with terrible (no) results. Your company appears to be very knowledgeable in SEO/Yahoo stores so we considered we’d inquire with you as to whether you might offer any “budget” services to help us with our site - particuarly with search engine rankings - can you evaluate our site and let us know?
Thank you.

Search3w: We have heard many stories like yours. The way Yahoo store works is very different than you can imagine.
Let’s face the facts. Yahoo has absolutely no ambition to let you success with organic Google ranking. Did you know that Google dislike to rank many sites that runs on same server (like Yahoo) and on the very same category?

Typically this is what you want to do:

You asked me about the budget. Search3w offering plans that range from $200 introductory service through to full service. On some plans our Recurring Usage Charge is $1 only.

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Barry: Can you look at our site and re : Converting dynamic web pages into static ones…Is that a solution to better SEO or can you make a proposition overall with our site and give us a creative idea of price. Currently, we are with Monster Commerce ( Network Solution ) and quite unhappy after spending good sums of money with poor results.
Thank you so much.

Search3w: Your site has zero PageRank, zero incoming links and suffers from poor indexing. Online jewelry is one of the highest competitive markets, and if you don’t have $100,000 for the 1st year your best bet is to do SEO yourself.

Static pages (and I mean real static pages, not tricks) will cost you too much at this point.
We can help you with only 5 hours to push your site forward and to do SEO yourself for the next 6 months. You’ll be ready for static conversion by then.

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My collegeaus and competitors have been writing about their website performance on 2007. Now it’s my turn.

These days if you are not on the first page of a Google search you might not be invisible. Research has shown that people rarely go beyond the first page of a Google search. The Internet offers a rapid and extremely low cost way to perform test price/products, measure, change cycle and compare the effects immediately, even for different geographic spots - at almost zero advertising cost.

Search3w has a proven solution and seven years of experience that will do 3 things for your business:

Increase your web visibility - People will be able to find your website easily when they are searching Google, MSN and Yahoo!

Increases sales - Once they do, the site will provide what they are looking for, quickly and easily, results with more conversions (sales).

Increase walk-in traffic - web visibility increases in-store traffic by 60% according to a Jupiter Media study (and proved by our client’s data).

Usability Process

We propose a two-part Usability process:
1. Search Engine Optimization, to get more people to your site, and
2. Usability Testing, to ensure they have a good experience once they are there.

“Improving the customer experience increases the number of buyers by 40% and increases order size by 10%.” Creative Good – The actual ROI from a usability test can vary dramatically, but it is rare to find a website that does not experience a positive return from this investment if they actually implement the changes recommended.

Usability testing done at Staples.com, for example, produced the following results:

- 67% more repeat customers - 31- 45% reduced drop off rates
- 10% better shopping experience - 80% increased traffic

A common web owners’ mistake is to think “Build it, and They Will Buy”. The fact is “Build it, and They Will Compare”. Online shoppers start by comparing not buying. Usability outputs will be published on Search3w Site Wizard pages so almost no effort needs to make by your staff.

Because of the way your current content management system has set up your site, Google will never rank your website well as it stands. However, Search3w uses proprietary technology to boost Web page rankings for sites such yours. With one client, for example, Search3w technology was responsible for:

- 33 TIMES more revenue in 1 month - $64,000 more sales in 1 month
- Increasing the web site visibility by a factor of 5
- Increasing walk-in customers by 60%

Read More on Usability >>

Mr. Pollard: Declined account, about 1 year ago, no particular reason given, just a short list and told it could one or more of the reasons.
Subsequent requests to join up declined, as URL is “associated with banned site.” I really don’t understand and have given up trying to get a straight answer. Does this make any sense to you? Site averages is about 15M unique a day, and about 80M page views, due to lots of unique content, which is added and up-dated all the time. Help!

Search3w: Thank you for contacting Search3w Search Engine Solutions.
In one hand we can’t any signs of banning for your website, but in the other hand your traffic volume does not match the fact that you have only ONE link on Google, low pagerank and zero related sites.

Something is WRONG HERE!

Please provide me with more details especially about:

“Declined account” -> declined by whom? Google adwords, Google organic, MSN…?

“just a short list” -> Can you FWD the list to my preview?

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Ksatish: One website has 5 domains all are opening separately without any redirect. In those domains one was optimised now a client asking another domain in those 5 to optimize is it possible or not?

Search3w: Dear Ksatish,

I prefer one big website divide into “areas”.
Be sure that Google knows about your brother/sister sites connections, and I can have proof it to you.
In and of itself that Google didn’t harm your site until the present time doesn’t mean it wouldn’t do it from here on.

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Geanie: I used google key words for several months but didn’t get one call. Now rankings are extremely low. Not sure if I am effected by Googles attack on Realtors (non authority sites). Can you tell me if it was and can it be improved. Thanks.

Search3w: Your landing page is a flash introduction. This explains all.
Point your visitors to a REAL page, with text content!

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The problem with these fast pace companies is that they’re forgetting the Quality Assurance process when new features are kicking in.
From time to time you can see this alert on Google AdWords:

Campaign Budget Alert
Your ads are not receiving 29% of their eligible impressions due to your current budget settings. Increasing your budget can maximize your ad exposure and help your ads receive more clicks.

Under the status, Google recently added a link “View recommended budget“, which is nice feature, but look at the “don’t change” button.This is a basic unit testing kindergarten!

I have so may bugs to report that it is crazy. Maybe Google would like to order my QA services, or they can get them from dummy blogs like this for free

What is ROI?
Return On Investment. The amount of value received relative to the amount of money invested, in this case, in advertising. ROI is an excellent measure of the success of any campaign.

How to calculate and Measure ROI for a website promotion?
Before you decide to measure your ROI, ask yourself these five questions:

The calculation process:
Conversion Ratio: Divide your number of orders by your unique visitors to arrive at your sales closing rate. The sales closing rate is the bottom line metric out there. It’s a measure of how many of your visitors actually complete the transaction you led them.

Customer Acquisition Cost: Divide your marketing expenses by the total number of orders you receive from unique new buyers over a given time period. Your cost of acquiring a customer is critical to improving your profitability and also your cash flow. With regard to the marketing expenses component of the calculation, some companies include a monthly amortization of the cost of the website as well as the monthly cost of maintaining the site, while other companies only consider promotional expenses. Use the approach that works best for you.

Sales Per Visitor: Calculate the actual average amount purchased per visitor (not per order).

Cost Per Visitor: Simply divide your marketing expenses (or your marketing expenses plus your Web expenses) by the number of unique visitors. Cost per visitor measures the effectiveness of your marketing and your conversion processes. The objective is to minimize cost per visitor and increase sales per visitor.
No Sale Rate: All Pages Divide the number of one-page visits to the entire site over a period of time by the total number of visitors over the same period of time. While focusing on top entry pages is more important in the short term, because that is where the traffic is happening, this more global metric is likely to point to global design flaws in navigation or page layout. When you make global design changes, pay attention to this one — you want it to be forever falling.

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