Banned Again

Something occurred the other day that people might find interesting, sorry about the long story.

I recently set-up a small network of 35 sites with rss feeds, a total of about 400 sub-domains, linked together. All domains recently expired. They all started to get a few pages in G, some up to 300, then suddenly all dropped to 0 Sh...

(at the same time I set-up a few more groups of sites that are currently doing well in G, with a few hundred pages each in the index)

I didn't do any sort of promotion except a ping to each site and sub-domain once. Nothing blackhat about any of the content.

I think my mistake was not checking the domain history carefully enough, I now think that 2 or 3 of the domains had previously been used as part of a link farm, perhaps with paid links. (I didn't check before because when I registered them google was showing a few pages indexed for each domain, so they weren't banned....)

Anyway, I tried pinging the sites again, no response from G, However every day G takes a page or two pages from the two domains that I think may have been link farms.

So, the domains may have been banned for linking to a 'bad neighbourhood', or they may have been banned because they have links from a link farm.

The REALLY interesting thing is that G is ignoring all the domains except the Bad ones. They haven't re-indexed these domains yet so I think they are spidering these pages looking for other sites to BAN!.

I may set-up an experiment to see if the link-in or link-out was the problem.. but I am busy so... BTW one of the 'bad' domains has 14,000 pages in Y, the other has 10,000

Not a big deal, you win some and loose some, but I thought I'd share this as there may be a lesson in it for others as well as myself.

scriptkiddy said:

The REALLY interesting thing is that G is ignoring all the domains except the Bad ones. They haven't re-indexed these domains yet so I think they are spidering these pages looking for other sites to BAN!.

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Or, maybe they're spidering those sites to check to see if the bad neighbor's links have been removed.

I has a similar problem last year when I bough a bunch of expired domains for a new project. Thankfully, all I did was put new content each domain without any linking within my network. G dropped 13 of the sites like a stone but left the other in SERPs. After about two months the 13 bad guys were relisted.

I didn't want to risk screwing up the other sites so I didn't link them directly to my network but I'm still using them to feed to squidoo lenses, hub pages and other sites which then link directly to my network. ;-)

easy said:

Or, maybe they're spidering those sites to check to see if the bad neighbor's links have been removed.

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It would make sense but they are only spidering the sites that (I think) are the bad neighbourhood. The other sites are being ignored. I've found before that if I ping a site G will usually fetch the page within a minute or two, but if it's banned the won't.

Yeah that's the worst when grabbing domains, you're never sure until they launch. Best bet is to launch your sites first, see how they do, then start adding them into your network. To get out of all this, the best way is to just unlink the bad sites, and run them right and things will go back to normal.