How My Popular Site was Banned by Google

Also: are any specific notices or warnings given in Google Webmaster Tools, to inform the webmaster and give some clues about the findings and decisions of your team?

Thanks Matt for taking time to explain things here.

What would really help is a clear reasoning given for the ban and a set of steps a site can take to get back in. From what I see often web masters are more than willing to make changes, they just don't know which to make. Often to the bans are said to be final, denying someone the chance to make it better.

I guess it is tempting to provide minimal support for organic search as people aren't paying and generally there are plenty of other sites to cover ones absence. One thing that would be good is say a yearly fee which guarantees that you can get one on one support if something happens.

Figure out how much it costs to respond to someone, offer that as a flat fee with a clear indication, that paying only gets you a consult on what's wrong with your site, and not any promise that it will get you reinstated. Basically what you did in your comments above.

I would personally make it expensive to make sure people don't try continually working the system by paying for the consult to get inside information about how to rank higher on Google.

I work in a support center, so I definitely recognize that it's expensive and difficult to do well at scale, so I appreciate that you're looking into how to do it!

We don't know each other but I think we know of each other. I'm rather immersed in webspam detection and found this incredibly interesting.

You imply that the challenge is finding a solution that scales. Yet it sounds to me from your response that this site was flagged via manual review. Did I misunderstand?

If I heard you correctly, then is manual review a significant equation in the webspam detection methodology? You guys are boiling the ocean so I find that rather hard to swallow.

The more likely conclusion I can draw is that he had a significant number of (auto-generated) pages on his site flagged as spam and that in turn raised some eyebrows.

BTW, you and your team are doing some amazing work. I wish the paid side was up to the standards you set.

From your reply, I understand that your primary issue is indeed with scaling any manner of support issues. As I understand it, the current thinking at Google is to seek automated solutions over technical to reduce costs and improve issue volume handling. With that in mind, is there a system of triggers that can flag issues for manual review or intervention instead of being handled completely automatically?

I think the majority of issues that have people up in arms aren't really that big, but there are the exceptions. Instead of monitoring G+/Twitter/etc., there could instead be a series of internal checks that look for particular criteria:

1. Age of campaign/ad - was it super old and not really applicable or not even running much budget? It may be worth a lighter hand than a complete ban because it isn't indicative of a trend or pattern on the part of the advertiser.

2. Amount of impressions/clicks/spend over time - what is the overall severity based on actual impact? Are users actively clicking on the ad, returning to the site and continuing to use it? As each click and therefore organic link is logged, it would be good to cross reference them and go "well, this site raises flags but has high return-user rates and decent sentiment in organic results"

3. Traffic vs. Content ratio - does the site have fairly thin content that still gets dramatic numbers of users? Tying in with #2, it basically can help tell if a site is offering something thin on content but highly unique and/or valuable. If people are using it, they may be on to something that the QS algorithm misses.

The one thing I'd love to see is just a little bit more of a verbose notification or warning for the people that get hit. While many only have themselves to blame, many want to make sure they stay on the right side and any chance they have to do so is of great benefit. Then again, it is also important to not give to much information to the black-hatters that just make use of it to get even better at gaming the system.

These are just thoughts, but it has long been on my mind considering the metric ass-ton I've run through AdWords for myself and clients over the years. Hope this helps spark a few ideas :)

Put yourself in the shoes of someone who is not a scammer and is trying to do a good job. Perhaps someone how is learning the ropes. Getting hit with an unilateral, violent and --for all intents and purposes-- permanent action such as seems common in these cases can be devastating.

I'd like to relate a case that I witnessed that was truly perplexing. It involved about 200 domains that were registered with GoDaddy and placed in their "cash parking" program.

They were there for months with no issues whatsoever. One day, the domain owner realized that this cash parking service was Google AdSense with GoDaddy taking a bite of the minimal action. So...he moved all the domains to a product called "AdSense for Sites" (I don't remember the exact name). This services was marketed by Google as a place to park your domains and earn some money through advertising that Google would automagically place on these domains. Same service that had been on these domains for ages through GoDaddy.

The transfer went well and all domains were accepted. No problems. The domains go "live", if you will, and ads start showing as predicted.

Two days later the account is cancelled and the domains are taken off the program citing "suspicious activity". The irony is that the sites --and their content-- were handled entirely by Google through this "AdSense for Domains" product. No self-clicking activity took place whatsoever. No nefarious activity of any kind. This person was far too busy with real business to go around clicking on ads across 200 domains to make $0.25 at the end of the day.

This was simply a transfer to Google for the same service that Google had been providing through GoDaddy for many months, years in some cases.

There was no recourse. No way to speak to anyone. No way to even try to understand what this "suspicious activity" was all about. The account was banned, closed, done...forever.

Now, here's a person who had plans for legitimate and valuable real sites to be launched on some of these domains later on. The whole experience scared him to a point of simply rejecting the idea of doing anything with Google if he could avoid it.

We had no way to provide any kind of an argument to the contrary because of the violent and totalitarian nature of the cutoff. Who would want to do business under those conditions?

The fact of the matter is that AdWords/AdSense generated revenue could evaporate overnight and with no recourse whatsoever. That's a tough pill to swallow for anyone who is a legitimate entrepreneur looking to build value and make some money or earn a living through their efforts.

Scammers are a different matter. However, you seem to treat both groups with the same hammer which, in my humble opinion, is not right.

I now have to advise anyone we work with that any income that relies on Google for either lead generation or direct income (AdSense) has to be treated as though it could evaporate at any time and for any reason without any real opportunity given to restore it in a timely fashion. Without that caveat on the table I couldn't personally advise anyone to use your products.

In a normal business one would engage with ones vendors in order to resolve issues in mutually beneficial ways. In this case it is a one-way street with violent and severe consequences for your customers and partners. That's what you have to fix.

In that case, Google Webmaster tools is not actually reporting an error. That's a report to show you what URLs Google tried to crawl but couldn't (due to being blocked) so you can review it and ensure that you are not accidentally blocking URLs that you want to have indexed.

I agree that it's confusing in that the report is in the "crawl errors" section.

(I built Google webmaster tools so this confusion is entirely my fault; but I don't work at Google anymore so sadly I can't fix this.)

In any case, I agree with you, search engine indexing search results would be bad, but the line is not that clear all the time!

Some vertical search engine result pages are a great and relevant result from a user perspective on the question they are trying to solve.