SEO Ask an expert Questions
These are some of the daily questions website owners asking us on “SEO Ask an expert” page.
Question from Mike: How can we block spider bots from stealing our email aliases?
Martin: Usually it is “catch 22″ — You want spider bots to visit your pages but not certain information.
There are clear rules spiders obey when it come to “friendly” spider like GoogleBot, and the like, but I’m not sure if you’re asking about them or about the “dogs”.
Mike: Thank you so much for your email reply.
We are an 11 year old virtual tour vendor in the Atlanta, GA area. We are having an increasing problem with our email system. Spider bots are apparently reading our email program somehow and stealing our email alias name and using then to do blasts of SPAM. Ad example:
[hidden]
The “links” is just one of our aliases. Here is another one I received today…
[hidden]
I am receiving well over 300 per day addressed to one of our aliases. In other words, we have our own mail server on a windows based machine. We use a product called “IMAIL”. Its revision is probably over 5 years old, but it has been working fine for our needs except for this problem. Some of our emails are actually SPAM with one of our aliases as the “from” which we did not send. We believe SPAMMERS are stealing our email names and sending mass amounts of SPAM to other clients across the nation. In some recent cases, this has black listed our site … from Bellsouth.net and Comcast.net.
We intend on changing the IP address for the mail server or the domain name to …net for our mail server. But before we do that, we need to stop the spider bots from getting in. Actually, on that machine, we really do not want ANY spiders to gain access.
Any advise would be grateful.
Thanks you, Mike
Martin: Hi Mike,
Sorry for the late response. I was locked into meetings at the search engines committee where I’m member at.
I solved this kind of problem to the BBB.org which they want real visitors only and none of the spiders as they count each memebr hits.
I can’t dig in deeper to your particular problem, and the free advice we can provide you is to use robots.txt file like this (you can copy its content and save it on your web root):
http://www.subsume.com/robots.txt
If there is still something you need from us, please let me know!
See all SEO Q&A >>
Question from John: My site used to be PR3, but after letting it lie dormant for 4 months and then substantially revamping it over the past 2 months, instead of the PR rating staying constant or improving, the site is now not indexed at all with Google. Is the site probably banned? If so, why?
Martin: The domain name has no PageRank value, it is LIKELY to be banned.
The domain name has only 2 Backlinks and no index pages . The domain name DOES appear to be banned.
Tell me what have you did in terms of Internet marketing in the last six months (all the truth!) so I can help you out.
John: Hello Martin,
Thank you for your reply. My site was first hosted with a company and built with their proprietary software. I became disenchanted with the service and the “coaching” that I was receiving. Consequently, I cancelled my agreement with them but had difficulty finding website building software to allow me to continue modifying the site. Therefore the site remained unchanged until the end of March when I finally found software that I could use (XSitePro).
When I rebuilt the site, I followed the guidelines provided by XSitePro.in terms of keyword density, etc.
To the best of my recollection, this is what I have done to market the site:
1. Submitted the site via Selfpromotion.com
2. Created and submitted to Google Sitemaps every time things changed on the site.
3. Link Exchanges with a few sites.
4. Submitted to free directories (including DMOZ)
5. Paid Best Web Directories.com to submit the site to 50+ directories. (as of last night, the site had been accepted in 25 or 26 of those directories)
6. I have also submitted articles to Ezine.com, GoArticles, and other article submission sites
7. I am in the process of contacting other websites with PRs from 2 up to 9 to try to get things happening.
8. I think I’ve also used Easy submit and Searchsight as well as Earthwarp or whatever it’s called.
9. I have exchanged links with sites found via Link Metro.
10. I’ve tried to stay away from Link Farms and those other schemes that are considered black hat.
11. One thing that I did NOT do was ask Google to completely delete my site. Instead I removed all the old pages myself and then uploaded the new version. (about 2/3 of the current site). Then as I changed the remaining pages, I added them two or three times/week and informed Google Sitemaps. I also visit Google Webmaster tools daily and request them to remove pages that are 404. I’ve been doing that for the past two months and have removed a total of 220 pages. When I last checked there a few minutes ago, there are two pages still 404 but I requested several days ago that they be removed from their index.
I’m not sure, but it’s possible that I may have submitted once or twice directly to Google itself.
As far as I can remember (and things are starting to get fuzzy because I’ve been working long hours on this). If I had any hair before I started this project, it has long ago disappeared.
I’ve done whatever I can think of to try to market the site and to respect their guidelines. In fact, I’ve done far more than I did when the site had a PR3 rating. I’m totally mystified why, after doing a total revamp of my site (look and feel, content rewritten, internal links added) my reward for all of this work is to be in a worse position than I was 9 months ago.
I hope I’ve given you enough info to give you some clues as to what the problem might be.
Sincerely, John
Martin: You did all possible wrong. Sorry to tell you that. Starting from “over SEO dosage”, continue with using submit services (get behind the rock! Submit services died in 2003 RIP) and topped with “Created and submitted to Google Sitemaps every time things changed “.
we took out many sites from banning and if you hand me the site and you do nothing you can be back to game in six to eight weeks. If the situation is serious than it can take 6 to 8 months!
Question from Jeff: My site had a google penalty for duplicate content. Maybe also for bad linking but not shure is this. A weber send me a email to told me I would write a spam-report to google. He had a lot of fun to kill my buisiness.
It’s only 4 days from now that it happen but I already clean up all my site as he got only unique content now and no more link back except 4 links of directorys that worth it and wich I’m in. I have a statements that said these directory accept our site and this proove our legimity.
I’m still first for my site name and my pages are still index. But my traffic drop 75% in a matter of seconds. I want to get back. I did not sent any re-inclusion yet cause I think it’s better show them I’ve been penalyse for a little while at least.
Martin: Please provide me with more details about your recent 12 months SEO “love fair” and we will get you out!
Jeff: My domain is an old one. I bought it in April 2003 but it was the property of someone else since 1998. For over 3 years now I did use a technique of duplicate content. Everypage got a root word and are duplicate in 30 to 90 page with the same content but the title and the H1 and H2 are firrerent each time. All these page are linked each other from the bottom with a list of text link containing the title of each page and the link are … and not only relative to document. So it give some backlink.
Sin 2 month from now I strat to promote my sote in many dytertorys wich ask for a link back. I then buil up a page with many partners links.
I removed those one and I kept onle the one wich worth something for (4 o them I had over 100 before), and I put a text saying that these directory accept our site dans they evaluare it so it proove how good he his.
Everything was going well and I had more and more traffic.
Then a mad webmaster send me an email saying Youhou!! I will send a spam report about your site for duplicate content hahaha! I found his IP address and I ban it from all my site and email.
It was the forst time in many years that I put a email on my site to let people contact me. And I remove it now because of this.
2 days after, it happens. My traffic drop on the floor. Nothing from google was coming anymore.
I then delete every duplicate page and bunch of link wich where all togheter. I build only unique content. I remove my back link as I said and theses directory will probably put ou mine in a little while.
Sinca that day, I write unique content to fill back all my page in order of the most traffique they where bringing me in the pas. I also have a not-found 404 page.
My pages are still in the index so faor, even dupicate ones. But my backlink are not there anymore. Only a few ones left. Which are my own site but on other servers with different IP’s.
My site still come up first when I type hes URL.
But my traffique is lost.
I saw on the web that this kind of penalty could last 30 days for the first offence if you make the good changes but you dont need to ask for a re-inclusion.
Do you think it’S true and I should wait a month before ask?
The fatal day where God throw my away is last July 12.
They only good new I got since then it’s my page views by visitors jump from 1,9 to 3,9 and the time pass from 1:30 min. to 3:17 min. and the rebound rate fall from 60% to 37%.
Please help me! Jeff
Martin: Jeff, Apparently every possible mistake has been done 
Can you list me the best keywords leads in your happy days?
Quickly looking at your site (and sending my own bot) I found
Five dead links and total of 232 pages index by Google - Bad ratio…
Many of the index pages are inside Google hell “Supplemental Result” - Read more about it at http://blog.search3w.com/selected-news/google-new-algorithms-and-search-engines-changes/ No Robots.txt found to solve described problem.
Wrong 404 redirect has been used.
..and so on..
If the site did a good income for you in the past, we can resurrect it by fixing all current problems.
Jeff: Hi,
I’m replying you back to tell you that my penalty been release this morning. But your advices been good for me so I want to tell you some info of my experience so you can add info on your site. Or play with it to make more money by knowing but not necessarly saying it.
Everywhere they said that there is a kind of 30 day penalty for first offense. For me it last 1 week, 7 days flush. My trafficwent down on july 12 in the middle of the day and came back this morning july 18.
Since I saw the traffick goes down and because the guy who sent a report spam told it to me 2 days before, I was ready to act and I did it right away. Since that day I start deleting all my copy pages and replace them by unique content one after the other stating in order of the modt traffik generator page. Ful day working non stop I upload and took off my link partner page. Kept only 4 of them wich had real valu ans replace a text wich was sayong write me to exchange link by These sites are directory wich accept our site, so it proove how good he is.
I did not write a re-inclusion letter to google. Nothing, I stay calm and gave no sound to them by any way.
I did not stop uploading like a crazy, I was really motivated.
Then this morning, In my analytics stats, Google was already at 250 visitors at 7 o’clock am. Every day during last week I received only 6 visitors from google.
I remark also that the coming back off google was gradual. Yesterday I receive 33 visitors, the day before 12 and every day before that including july 13 I receive 5 or 6 visitors. So since two days I start to double and then today its back to normal.
So I hope it will help you knowing more about it and knowing that if you act pretty quick it can last as low as 7 days. I’ll contact you back if I made a mistake and if my traffik stop during the day. If no news from me, it means everthing is fine.
Thanks again for your support.
I have a nother wich had the panealty the same day and I did send a re-inclusion for this one and he is still penalize.
Jeff