Hello everyone,
The average UV I was getting for my site was 500-700 daily, until the March. The 1st March I found out that one of my websites got deindexed by g00gle. I felt disappointment since I was really working hard to gain highest rankings for my keywords. This is the message I got from g00gle:
"Dear site owner or webmaster of (my site),
We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines. If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team"
"Huh, quality issues?!", I thought. There was nothing wrong with the quality of articles, each of them was unique and well written. The only problem for my website could have been that it was overly-promotive. I could whine and talk how all my good work was destroyed by only one click of one of the g00gle engineers, but that was something I didn't want to waste time on.
So what did I do?
STEP 1:
-Removed Adsense
-Removed every other type of advertisement (left only 2 banners on sidebar, so it wouldn't look like I was editing much)
-Removed all H1, H2, H3 Titles and left only H3
-Removed Tagcloud
-Removed some "unpopular" SEO plugins (Auto SEO Tags - never use it, g00gle hates it!)
-Wrote two more unique 1500+ words articles
It took me 8 hours in all to complete all of the above (+ discuss over google help center with some egocentric, "wanna be" g00gle engineers), but it was worth it, heck I didn't want to see all of my work destroyed!
STEP 2:
-Appeal for reconsideration
There are two options you can try here. So can write an appeal how you don't know why you got deindexed, and that this was uncommon for you since you are a real expert in your field, etc. Or you can try to be honest, admit your mistakes and hope that they will like your fairness. This time I chose the first option.
Now, after my appeal for reconsideration I knew that I should have wait for the manual review of some of the g00gle quality staff. They are mostly from India, and are pretty fair and honest. And after 11 days I got a response:
"Dear site owner or webmaster of (my site),
We received a request from a site owner to reconsider (my site) for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
We've reviewed your site and we believe that some or all of your pages still violate our quality guidelines.
In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from (my site) may not appear or may not rank as highly in Google's search results, or may otherwise be considered to be less trustworthy than sites which follow the quality guidelines.
If you wish to be reconsidered again, please correct or remove all pages that are outside our quality guidelines. When such changes have been made, please visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?hl=en and resubmit your site for reconsideration.
If you have additional questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team"
"Okay, back to the drawing board." But there was nothing more I could change, maybe only the layout of my site. So I decided to give it another try. Maybe the guy who reviewed my site was just in the bad mood, maybe he made a mistake? Anyways, I wrote my appeal in the same tone as my previous one and 2 days ago I received a response:
"We received a request from a site owner to reconsider (my site) for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
Previously the webspam team had taken manual action on your site because we believed it violated our quality guidelines. After reviewing your reconsideration request, we have revoked this manual action. It may take some time before our indexing and ranking systems are updated to reflect the new status of your site.
Of course, there may be other issues with your site that could affect its ranking without a manual action by the webspam team. Google's computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users. If your site continues to have trouble in our search results, please see this article for help with diagnosing the issue.
Thank you for helping us to maintain the quality of our search results.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team"
So, I was right. Manual review was on my side this time.
Add it to STEP 3:
-If you fail, try your luck one more time, but DON'T GIVE UP
Thank you all for reading and I hope some of you could benefit from my experience. If someone does, it would make me a really happy man.
The average UV I was getting for my site was 500-700 daily, until the March. The 1st March I found out that one of my websites got deindexed by g00gle. I felt disappointment since I was really working hard to gain highest rankings for my keywords. This is the message I got from g00gle:
"Dear site owner or webmaster of (my site),
We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines. If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team"
"Huh, quality issues?!", I thought. There was nothing wrong with the quality of articles, each of them was unique and well written. The only problem for my website could have been that it was overly-promotive. I could whine and talk how all my good work was destroyed by only one click of one of the g00gle engineers, but that was something I didn't want to waste time on.
So what did I do?
STEP 1:
-Removed Adsense
-Removed every other type of advertisement (left only 2 banners on sidebar, so it wouldn't look like I was editing much)
-Removed all H1, H2, H3 Titles and left only H3
-Removed Tagcloud
-Removed some "unpopular" SEO plugins (Auto SEO Tags - never use it, g00gle hates it!)
-Wrote two more unique 1500+ words articles
It took me 8 hours in all to complete all of the above (+ discuss over google help center with some egocentric, "wanna be" g00gle engineers), but it was worth it, heck I didn't want to see all of my work destroyed!
STEP 2:
-Appeal for reconsideration
There are two options you can try here. So can write an appeal how you don't know why you got deindexed, and that this was uncommon for you since you are a real expert in your field, etc. Or you can try to be honest, admit your mistakes and hope that they will like your fairness. This time I chose the first option.
Now, after my appeal for reconsideration I knew that I should have wait for the manual review of some of the g00gle quality staff. They are mostly from India, and are pretty fair and honest. And after 11 days I got a response:
"Dear site owner or webmaster of (my site),
We received a request from a site owner to reconsider (my site) for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
We've reviewed your site and we believe that some or all of your pages still violate our quality guidelines.
In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from (my site) may not appear or may not rank as highly in Google's search results, or may otherwise be considered to be less trustworthy than sites which follow the quality guidelines.
If you wish to be reconsidered again, please correct or remove all pages that are outside our quality guidelines. When such changes have been made, please visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?hl=en and resubmit your site for reconsideration.
If you have additional questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team"
"Okay, back to the drawing board." But there was nothing more I could change, maybe only the layout of my site. So I decided to give it another try. Maybe the guy who reviewed my site was just in the bad mood, maybe he made a mistake? Anyways, I wrote my appeal in the same tone as my previous one and 2 days ago I received a response:
"We received a request from a site owner to reconsider (my site) for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
Previously the webspam team had taken manual action on your site because we believed it violated our quality guidelines. After reviewing your reconsideration request, we have revoked this manual action. It may take some time before our indexing and ranking systems are updated to reflect the new status of your site.
Of course, there may be other issues with your site that could affect its ranking without a manual action by the webspam team. Google's computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users. If your site continues to have trouble in our search results, please see this article for help with diagnosing the issue.
Thank you for helping us to maintain the quality of our search results.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team"
So, I was right. Manual review was on my side this time.
Add it to STEP 3:
-If you fail, try your luck one more time, but DON'T GIVE UP
Thank you all for reading and I hope some of you could benefit from my experience. If someone does, it would make me a really happy man.
