Thread: The Google Headache

So once again thank you Google for all your wonderful traffic and the migrains associated therein !

I spent the day today searching one of my sites which is not only very OLD it was my second ever built but it is a MONSTER in size - google simply decided to de-list my site for no explained reason

Pages on your site may not appear in Google search results pages due to violations of the Google webmaster guidelines. Please review our webmaster guidelines and modify your site so that it meets those guidelines. Once your site meets our guidelines, you can request reconsideration and we'll evaluate your site.

So I emailed someone I know over there at google {which I absolutely hate to do cause its like asking for a favor from god himself} to find out wtf went wrong cause all the sudden boom my google traffic had dropped to 0 and that nice little message above was in my google dashboard- The reply I got back from my buddy at google was that some code in one of the pages of the site was "Out of place"

OMFG can you be any less specific - alas I found it tho and now mind you this snippet of code has been in the site for imlive for a LONG LONG time and god knows how the fuck it got above the head command but it did html editor error - human error take your pick but it happened - the main page of the site would have been the last place I would have looked as the site hasnt been modified since GW bush took office the FIRST time!
For fuck sakes google PLEASE be more specific in your descriptions of things so as to save TIME!

I dont really think that de-listing a site for a snippet of code being out of place in the html is good cause for a complete de-listing - it didnt affect the page performance 1 little bit the surfers that visited have been surfing the site just fine and yahoo kept on sending em in despite the little error ~

Grrrrrr google pisses me off some days!

I'd be ecstatic that you know someone at G who can point out why you've dropped.

Thanks for sharing.

I agree though, you got way more then any of us would have gotten. We still would be delisted and screwed.

I do appreciate you sharing your story to help other people though.

Hehe, procam has friends in high places!

Ouch, luckily that seems like a definitive answer though, and combined with having the code in your header.

Hopefully the simple fix returns the site back to the index, I'd like to know how it pans out either way.

Originally Posted by smoothballs

its fucking me off two, got one or two biggish tgps that give good signups results and have the same message about violation of google guidelines when beforehand been no problems for a couple of years! Really need google to tell me exactly what is offending them so I can act on it, but right now not got a clue why they been dropped! grrrr!

Anyone know of a online tool that you can run your site through to see if it meets their guidelines and show what the errors are?

Tools
Lynx Viewer, Search Engine View Emulation
Validation Results - W3C Markup Validator
CSE HTML Validator - Powerful HTML Validator, XHTML Validator, CSS Validator, and More

This is just a few helping tools -- theres tons of them out there

You are doing a lot of guess work and looking for severe errors first right?

Originally Posted by rowan

Hehe, procam has friends in high places!

So does Garth Brooks! But he doesn't blame Google - he blames his roots! Just because he showed up in boots....

Ok, I'll be quiet now and let the adults work.