Site violates Google's quality guidelines

[K@rl]

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.

 

[K@rl]

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.

 

[K@rl]

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

 

[K@rl]

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.

 

[K@rl]

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.

 

[K@rl]

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.

 

[K@rl]

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.

 

[K@rl]

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

 

[K@rl]

It's fine as long as you add

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.

 

[K@rl]

Maybe it was a combination of the two. I'll wait a little while and then take a couple articles and see how it goes.

They are indeed breaking the terms, ive had quite a few emails of late asking for back links to be removed.

More proof that Google is slowly taking over the world.