I ran into a question posted by another webmaster wondering why two of his web stores were banned by Google. These websites were running fine for at least one year. And another two of his stores remain indexed. Looking over his websites left me guessing as to the exact reason why Google removed them from their index.
Was it because he was caught (perhaps unknowingly) linking to a site known for its link schemes? Was it because of the five or so footer links included on the site as part of the licensing agreement for the script he uses? Was it just because this store is viewed as a “thin affiliate”? Or was it for something else?
I searched all around looking for answers. All I found were posts guessing as to why Google has banned specific sites. I could find no facts coming from Google stating any specific reasons for a ban. They seem to want to keep this information top secret, so webmasters don’t learn exactly what causes a site to be flagged and to keep it from being abused.
But without any solid facts, it will be difficult for us to improve our existing sites. We won’t be able to fix those problems that we don’t know exists, or waste a lot of time (and money) on something that may not be necessary.
We could not even dig into any particular website’s background to see what they may of been guilty of prior to their ban as this information has also been removed from their cache. Most of the responses by the “SEO experts” seem to fall back on the Webmasters Quality Guidelines, which states, “Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.”
Sure it would be great if we all could afford to hire our own staff to do the coding, designing, and marketing for us. This would certainly avoid a lot of the problems we face, but would be too costly for us “mom and pop” type stores trying to compete with the big guys. So being on the limited budget that we are, we tend to rely on those scripts that can be viewed as “cookie cutter” or “scrapers”. Is this a legitimate reason to dump our sites from the index and push us out of town?
“Little or no original content” ? Does this mean we now have to fill up our pages with other content? Should we start posting all that useless sales fluff and rehashed news releases just like the big names do? Or will that only end up detracting our viewers from their shopping experience? Could it be that we intended for our stores to get right to the products they are seeking? Isn’t that the reason a viewer would be at a web store? Seems to be a valid reason for our site to continue to exist with the rest. Or are we now supposed to be like all the major stores where it can be overwhelming to find exactly what your looking for?
“Little or no original content” ? Who are they to judge anyway? As the saying goes, “One man’s trash is another’s treasure.” So wouldn’t this be better left up to the viewers to decide?
“Little or no original content” ? I find it kind of ironic too that the one deciding this is guilty of the same. Their results are nothing more than scraped content itself.
How can we be sure that our web stores won’t be next to be axed from the index?
