ISEdb.COM

Jill,

My site, which is full of good content (1500 or so pages), was dropped by Google 3 months ago. We are a small business and as a result we are close to going out of business (we rely on advertising revenue).

The only thing I can think of is that we have the co.uk as well as the .com version of the site that is a duplicate originally produced for back-up reasons. Is it possible Google would exclude one from the index? I am quite happy to sacrifice .co.uk if it is, since all external links were to .com, but at the moment it is keeping us afloat.

Also is there any way at all I can get Google’s attention?

I have emailed Google, written to them, etc. but the organisation seems impenetrable and I cannot find a way to get a useful answer – I did get one answer which simply stated:

“Your page has been blocked from our index because it does not meet the quality standards necessary to assign accurate PageRank.We cannot comment on the individual reasons your page was removed.”

However, it is the whole site that has gone, not just one page.

Grateful for your advice.

Kind Regards,

Tony

Jill’s Response

Hi Tony,

Yes, the engines would show only one instance of your site instead of both the .com and the co.uk, as there’s no reason for them to have duplicates in the results.

You’ll want to set up a 301-redirect from the .co.uk domain to the .com one, and that should help you out.There are lots of threads at my forum about this if you’re unsure how to do it.Since Google said they have blocked you, you’ll want to also file a reinclusion request with them and let them know what you did to take action.This all assumes that you haven’t actually done anything spammy, because if you have, you’ll have to clean it up completely before you apply for reinclusion.

There’s also a new thread pinned at the forum that Randy, one of our moderators, put together with all the search engines’ contact info.You can find it here: .

Good luck!

Tony’s Follow-up Questions

Jill,

Thank you so much for taking the time to reply. First time I have felt there is anyone listening!

If I do the 301 redirect is there any guarantee Google will re-index the .com site? Or does it need me to take other action to try and get it re-included?

What I am terrified of is redirecting and then finding .co.uk is no longer in the index but .com doesn’t get back in and we end up even worse off with no Google traffic at all.

The thing that disturbs me is that looking at the log file analysis across the few days either side of the New Year, Googlebot had 1200+ hits on the .co.uk site but just 1 hit on the .com site – which I naively assume means .com is flagged in some way as being excluded. Am I reading this correctly?

Sorry for these supplementary questions — I’m conscious of your valuable time and I don’t want to abuse your goodwill in replying to me.

Jill’s Reply

Hi Tony,

There are never any guarantees of anything, but the 301 should do the trick for you if you truly haven’t done anything deceptive.There could definitely be some lag time, though, and you’re going to have to have patience.

I would suggest simply biting the bullet and doing it. Eventually, it will all work out as it is supposed to as long as you really haven’t done anything besides having the same domain with 2 different URLs (which is not a deceptive thing, but a very common one).Also, if there are indeed any links pointing to the .co.uk URL be sure to get as many of them changed over to the .com if you can.That will help speed things along.

Do it sooner rather than later, as the sooner you do it, the sooner the .com will start getting indexed again.

Jill

Multiple SEO Questions

Hi Jill

When I subscribed to your newsletter I did not ask you any questions because I did not have any.But now I do have a few.

1. I bought several domain names and have them parked with Go Daddy. Can I use one or some of them to point to my website?(I would like to use at least one in print advertising to know where the leads are coming from.)

The reason I ask is that I have read at different forums a lot about duplicate sites etc. and the people did not know whether pointing other domain names to a website is bad or does not matter for SEO. There was a lot of conflicting information about that. This is my main question because I am going to do my print advertisement this week.

2. I have other small webpages that I got from different sources over the years. On each of them I put a link to my website. Is it good or bad for SEO or does it not matter? Should I get rid of these pages?

3. I have a site that has been under construction for 3 years under a different URL, it is not live. On our “under construction” page I also put a link to my site. (Because the name of this site is much easier for people to remember than my name, I use it in radio advertising.) Does it affect SEO?

Should I get rid of this link?

4. Two pages of my website are framed (I framed other sites). I have read somewhere that framing is not good. Should I get rid of frames and put a link to these sites on my website instead?

5. There is something wrong with my SEO & Google. On MSN & YAHOO for my keywords I am on the first page. Thanks to you and others I optimized a few pages of my website, I think, quite well for specific keywords and got this placement with MSN & Yahoo for these pages (before, it was erratic and sporadic).

But I have never had placement with Google although I have had this website for a year now. Google does not show any links although I checked with Marketleap that I have around 300 links. I think that I am penalized by Google and I do not know for what.

Thank you so very much for your kindness. I really appreciate the fact that you offered to answer questions in your previous e-mail although I am sure you are a very busy person. I love your website and newsletter and recommend them to other people all the time.

Sincerely,

Barbara

Jill’s Reply

Hi Barbara,

What you want to do is place a permanent redirect on all your extra domains, pointing to your main domain.That way you can use whichever you want for print ads, etc., but won’t have to worry about the engines mistakenly indexing anything but the main domain (which is what you want).The instructions for doing so are in my Redirecting Multiple Domains article.

If your main site would be of interest to those people who might be visiting those other sites, then it’s fine to have a link to your site on them, and it could be helpful to your main site as every site needs links pointing to it.You should also make sure that other people’s sites are also linking to yours, because if the only ones linking are all owned by you, then your links won’t count as much as if they were a real “vote” from other sites.

Regarding the framing issue, frames won’t hurt you, but those other sites might not like your framing their content that way, so a link to them is probably a better idea.

As to Google’s not showing your backward links, it’s important to know that Google’s link command doesn’t actually tell you what links they know about.

Don’t worry about that, you can rest assured they know about your links and they are counting them to your overall link popularity.

Hope this helps, and good luck with it!