Yet another Google Penalty thread

[Giorgio]

A couple of months ago I picked up two domains from a fellow forum member. There were a couple of weeks between the acquisition, and the actual transfer, as the seller's host was down and we couldn't get to the site anymore.

So after a couple of weeks we just transferred the domains, and he sent me the content via email. I spent about a day of work creating a new site on the domain, and spread a couple of links throughout my own network of mini sites.

Until this moment, the site in question - depositpoker.co.uk - is still not appearing in Google's index, and I have no idea what's the cause could be.

Fwiw, the site appears to be in both Yahoo's and Bing's indexes, at least some pages.

I recently also replaced content from another domain (TM issue) to the one in question, and 301-ed the old pages. The old domain - pokerheavenreview.com - used to get some traffic, and most of the pages are gone from G's index by now.

I have a feeling that the site doesn't have enough links pointing to it, but before I put links on some of my main sites, I want to make sure nothing's wrong.

Any thoughts?

[Peter Willis]

A quick check of all the backlinks currently coming in shows that they all have the same anchor text (deposit poker). Even though it's the "name" of your domain, you still could have tripped the wire. Try adding a few "click here's" etc into the mix.

[doovde]

Is it possible that you put wordpress on there and didn't turn the privacy to allow search engines to enter the site?

[Newjabber]

Is it possible that you put wordpress on there and didn't turn the privacy to allow search engines to enter the site?

Yeah you had to do that a few wp versions ago. I had a few sites where i had this problem.

[AceHigh Pino]

The 301-redirects you did to the new site could've triggered Google's attention as well. My newest site got hit I think cuz I changed a bunch old URLs to cleaner structures (although to be clear I don't think it's a penalty - yet) and it might've looked suspicious to the big G. Now I know I didn't redirect from an old site like you did, but the fact is things like this can throw up red flags and might make it seem like you're trying to deceive the SE's.

My site may not have been penalized in a traditional sense (not ranking for my own domain name, falling off the map for other top queries I had, etc), but I can tell ya I did have 2/3rds of my site de-indexed out of the blue and there's no telling if those 200+ pages will be coming back any time soon

[Michael Martinez]

There are some outbound links in your footer that you might want to remove before pointing links from your main domains. I'm not suggesting they're bad -- I just think you want to start with as clean a picture as possible.

The problem with this puzzle is that you complicated the analysis by doing the 301-redirect before figuring out what (if anything) was wrong.

And not to cast aspersions on an unnamed fellow forum member, but you provide very little information about the history of the domain and the seller. I'm not trying to create suspicion or point fingers -- I'm just saying that second-guessing what is going on with the site is very difficult given how little information we have.

It doesn't look to me like the site should be penalized and it also seems to be a little link-poor. But even so, if it was indexed before the previous owner's host went down, it must have had sufficient linkage, right?

Are those links still in place? Was he supporting the site with his own network and then took those links down? (Which I think would be okay -- it just seems a little curious to me that the site was indexed before but now cannot get in.)

[321]

The host was down for awhile... and you have copied content from another domain to this domain?

Both reasons will get you dropped. The chances of it being anything else are close to zero.

If the old pages still in the index, the new ones may never show up till the old ones disappear.

[Giorgio]

Thanks for your advices. Here is some more info:

Bought two domains, depositpoker.co.uk, and depositbingo.co.uk, from a fellow forum member. I got a real bargain getting these two sites, of which one, depositpoker.co.uk, had a decent amount of pages.

However, when we wanted to transfer these sites to me, we found out that the host was down, and that we couldn't access the server to get the files, and database. The fellow forum member in question was very helpful, and didn't make me pay until the moment I really had everything in my possession.

So, once we finally were able to change the ownership of these domains, he recovered the content from his old laptop, and sent it to me via e-mail. At this point I set-up the current site, and spread a few links on some of my smaller sites so that it would get crawled to get indexed soon.

After some time, the depositpoker.co.uk still was nowhere to be found in G's index, but I decided to let it rest.

Then I got an email from Poker Heaven that another one of my sites, pokerheavenreview.com, was infringing their trademark, and they requested me to take it down, but left me the opportunity to redirect the pages to a new location. I decided to permanently (301 redirect) move the pages from pokerheavenreview.com to depositpoker.co.uk, since depositpoker.co.uk could use something to monetize it anyway, and I hoped that maybe this would also help the site to get indexed.

Recapitalizing:

• The content from depositpoker.co.uk is all unique content that was previously published on the domain.
• There's nothing that tells/told me that the site has a history to worry about.
• The old pages pokerheavenreview.com pages are mostly gone from G's index.
• I never had problems before 301-ing sites/pages to new locations.

Actions I will take:

• Build more links to the site with various anchors, including a few homepage links from related sites with decent traffic which are crawled several times a day.
• Remove the footer links, as suggested by Michael.
• Put up a robots.txt file.
• Add the site to Google Webmaster Tools (even though I initially wanted to leave this site out).

About Wordpress, all settings seem to be all right.

Anymore suggestions, please fire 'em my way.

Thanks!

Edit: I just added depositpoker.co.uk to Google Webmaster Tools and I found out that there was already a sitemap.xml.gz present (since September 6), after I submit the regular sitemap.xml manually.

[cloudbreak]

Have you tried filling out a reconsideration request? Your site, if manually reviewed would very likely pass if for some reason it was pulled from the index algorithmically as the current content is good and you're not running a thin affiliate site (dont know what it looked like prior). If you get it reviewed and still no luck then at least you have more information about your site.

Submit for reconsideration, be honest, and I'm willing to bet in less than 2 weeks you're back in the index.

[Giorgio]

Yep, in fact I did about two weeks ago, and am now waiting for them to process it. Hopefully I will finally see the site indexed, then I can move on with it.