Site violates Google's quality guidelines

K@rl · 26 Mar 2013 at 09:40

Hi All

I've run a website for many years and it's been quite popular. I've now been hit with the google ban hammer and received an email from them advising the site "violates Google's quality guidelines".

I've set all my links to no follow but each time I resubmit I just get a message that its failed again - no further info on why its happened.

Anyone else been hit by this? I'm gutted as not so long ago it was PR4.

Tripnologist · 26 Mar 2013 at 09:44

What's your content like? Is it original? Are there a lot of unnatural links pointing to your site?

K@rl · 26 Mar 2013 at 09:54

Links in are fine.

I have sold some "sponsored" links in the past to help cover my costs but the whole lot is set to no follow.

Wayn0r · 26 Mar 2013 at 13:06

Doesn't really help diagnose the issue.

What sort of content are you running? Is it adult? Is the content original or 'copied' from elsewhere?

dfarrall · 26 Mar 2013 at 13:23

Post site link if its appropriate.

K@rl · 26 Mar 2013 at 13:57

the site is www.hypermiler .co.uk

Its all original content and its got some high value inbound links. Not sure if google has taken issue with me selling sponsored articles as they don't want competition for adwords etc..

Cheers for the help guys

Scougar · 26 Mar 2013 at 14:11

They have no right to dictate what advertisements you use, and it would be pretty pathetic to exclude you from searches because of that. It must surely be something else?

Well done for selling articles, but that doesn't sit right with me if it dictates the outcome of your article.

K@rl · 26 Mar 2013 at 14:20

Its not the outcome of the article that is defined by the advertiser, simply the text link back to their clients website is enough.

I have always preferred to create the articles myself as in most cases it means the article is actually of worth. That hasn't always been the case but short of dropping a huge percentage of my posts I don't know what to do.

It's already started to plummet from the rankings, dropping from PR4 to 0 is a big hit.

I've got some other sites that I do it on and they are fine.

TheAlex · 27 Mar 2013 at 21:13

As you mention links, have Google specifically mentioned links? It may be your external links that are the problem. A quick scan of your backlinks shows you have a high percentage of exact match anchor text for 'hypermiling' - which probably looks unnatural - and these links often appear in sidebars and on websites unrelated to yours (so won't be considered good quality).

Also, if the sort of links you have here were paid for (or look like they were paid for), that won't have helped: http://www.allaboutmoney.com/money/21-money-saving-ideas-for-your-car-0-5684.htm

I've never had to remove any unnatural links myself but I've read a bit about the subject.

Edit - if it is an unnatural links warning, for reconsideration you'll have to attempt to get the low quality links removed - and keep documentation (e.g. e-mails, spreadsheet with details of who you've e-mailed and dates) as evidence to present to Google in case some of those links aren't removed. There are extensive guides to doing this online. This is short and may help you: http://searchengineland.com/googles...atural-links-pointing-to-your-web-site-148190

uniQ · 27 Mar 2013 at 21:44

You are duplicating a lot of your own content. Example:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=T....&aqs=chrome.0.57j64&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

Consider noindex'ing via robots.txt your categories, archives & tags etc (or use a noindex plugin):

User-agent: *
Disallow: /category/
Disallow: /tag/

K@rl · 28 Mar 2013 at 14:28

Cheers guys for the help on this guys it's much appreciated.

I've never had to pay for incoming links however I go have quite a large collection of sites that I've used to back link this one in particular.

If it's the number of inbound links then it's gonna be a bit of a **** as I have no control over these.

I've already set all the links within the site to be no follow but I see what you mean about the content. Looks like my use of WP tags could be an issue here but then that's what they are there for?

I'm continuing to produce original and relevant content for the site in the hope that after a month or so google will reconsider their position. I've also removed all the back links from some of my low value sites.

Luckily, I've not seen a massive drop in traffic and my adsense revenue is still about what it was.

Dark_Injection · 28 Mar 2013 at 14:54

As said above it looks like you are indexing your articles wrong and producing duplicate content. I cant have a proper look on your site because it is down.

Also if you say that you have accepted sponsored advertisements (i guess you had to write an article and they paid you?) then Google will pick up on this. You cant do much if that is the case. You are black hatted, so good luck.

Rule number 1, dont do anything remotely dodgey with your site now. If I could see your site I could help out a bit more.

In the link posted above to Google results you can see

www.hypermiler.co.uk/.../scotish-bp-tanker-drivers-begin-thre

+

www.hypermiler.co.uk/2013/02

Contain the same content and are posted on the 22nd and 26th. Seems something is going wrong. We had a similar issue with tagging and date indexing on our blog and have had to restructure it since the new panda and penguin updates.

K@rl · 28 Mar 2013 at 15:24

Dark_Injection said:
Also if you say that you have accepted sponsored advertisements (i guess you had to write an article and they paid you?) then Google will pick up on this. You cant do much if that is the case. You are black hatted, so good luck.

Yup - guilty as charged. I had quite a run and made a few bob.

I see what you mean about the tag and category views. I think I could fix this buy changing the tag and category views in the template so it only shows the article link and not the excerpt. It's a bit hacky but will stop any duplication of data on the different URL's.

**done that. It's not pretty but It'll do for now

You say the site was down? The server is heavily monitored from external and it's not shown any indication of an outage. Was that just before you posted - I'll have a look at the syslog.

Again - thanks for looking. If they've caught be on sponsored articles then fair enough. I'm just a bit ****** that all I get back is the same blanket response.

Dark_Injection · 28 Mar 2013 at 17:14

Are you using Wordpress?

Firstly I would install Yoast on your server, this then lets you set a lot of parameters for SEO, and only use this for your meta data.

If you are using Wordpress I then wouldn't tag or categorize any of your posts via Wordpress. I would also remove timestamping/datestamping from the url. We have changed this for our new blog to remove complications.

Yes the site was down, it 404'ed on me. Think it was just before I posted.

Maybe other people were doing stories for certain companies and there was lots of similar content and backlinks growing for different companies/products and they noticed this. There really isn't much you can do in that case.

Im not an SEO pro but I blog a lot (im a marketer mainly) so if you need help just message me

K@rl · 28 Mar 2013 at 17:27

Yeah using WP.

I've found the tags quite helpful when using them for linking within the site but I'll also give that a try. I don't use the date, it uses the category to set the URL.

It was mostly agencies so no doubt I've been hit with that. I'll give a while and see what happens. Short of removing a large number of posts I'm tempted just to leave it.

I did the same with another website but the PR bounced back to 4 after the Panda update.

Dark_Injection · 2 Apr 2013 at 15:59

I wouldn't expect the PR to jump back up this time. Just so you know. Google have been making some videos recently stating the whole guideline structure and they won't be letting people off any more.

If you sort everything (and I would stop using categories and anything built inside of WP) then you may get away with it. You could hide the content at least. I would definitely remove any back links you have set. At least on your next page crawl they would be gone.

unwashed potato! · 3 Apr 2013 at 16:12

so am i right in thinking i cannot create and article on my blog with a link back to another website if it's paid for by that website?

K@rl · 6 Apr 2013 at 12:49

You can create the articles but don't expect Google to like it. They want to be the one controlling the advertising on the Web, not you!

Success on my part anyway. I found a way to find and remove any dodgy links and I also fixed my template with the duplicate content issue.

Thanks for all your help. Back at pr 3

TheAlex · 6 Apr 2013 at 20:56

Fairly sure the answer is no said:
so am i right in thinking i cannot create and article on my blog with a link back to another website if it's paid for by that website?

It's fine as long as you add

Code:

rel="nofollow"

to the a href link tag.

K@rl · 7 Apr 2013 at 23:30

TheAlex said:
It's fine as long as you add

Code:

rel="nofollow"

to the a href link tag.

My first attempt to get my PR back was to do this and I get the same message back from google. I don't think this is enough any more.

Advertisers also won't accept this as they want your link "juice" to help boost their client website PR - the no follow stops this from happening.