Site Down Time

[doovde]

When you moved the site, did you download the files from the hacked server and upload them to the new server, or did you upload them from a secure backup?

Does Google show a malware warning for any of the sites either in its SERPs or in its Chrome browser?

Although Google recently announced a very aggressive policy toward spammy linking practices, unless you're dropping links in blog comments and forums it seems unlikely you would have tripped that kind of penalty (but I cannot rule it out, especially based on a just a forum discussion).

It might be that a reinclusion request is in order. I have heard that if the situation is resolved Google MAY reply and let you know "all is okay". Supposedly, if they say nothing then there may still be a penalty (but this is all hearsay -- I don't know exactly when or why Google responds to these requests).

If you have a significant number of Websites that use spammy tactics then where they are hosted doesn't matter if Google can connect them all to you -- they will be very skeptical about trusting even totally clean sites from people they deem to be repeat spammers.

When I moved the site I did everything manually which might seem crazy but i wanted to be 100% sure I wasn't taking the virus/hack with me. I re created all the pages and just cut and paste the text onto them.

I jsut ran a malware check on one of the affected sites using this command - http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site= - and:

Of the 1 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 0 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 2009-10-27, and suspicious content was never found on this site within the past 90 days.

Strangely the same query on the moved site results in this:

What is the current listing status for onlinebingohalls.org?

This site is not currently listed as suspicious.

What happened when Google visited this site?

Google has not visited this site within the past 90 days.

Not sure why google wouldnt have visited in the last 90 days? but maybe this is the root of the problem. Could the malware trigger something that hasnt been un triggered so to speak?

[doovde]

PS. just ran a check on a totally un connected site and it retuned the same as the moved site. I know google has visited in the last 90 days cos it's oinly recently been indexed. Maybe thats just a bug / error.

[Michael Martinez]

If Google hasn't visited the site in the last 90 days, you probably have a low PageRank issue. Your backlinks may not be passing value.

Is the site authenticated with Google's Webmaster Tools? You can see when a page was last fetched and indexed there. Sometimes Google's one hand doesn't agree with the other. If Webmaster Tools says it's been a long time since your pages were fetched, then you probably lack good links.

[doovde]

Site was crawled on the 15th of Jan

[jdwanchalk]

I hope I never have to deal with this shit.

[Hazo]

I hope I never have to deal with this shit.

That's funny, haha.

Sorry to make light of the situation Doovde, it sucks. I don't have any enlightening thoughts to share I'm afraid.

[Michael Martinez]

Okay, I see now that you're using the All-in-One SEO Pack and that it is inserting "noindex" tags on at least some of your pages, impeding your site's crawl.

[doovde]

All in one seo is noindexing categories and achieves, I have turned that feature off. It was never a problem in the past.

Do you think i should go with a re inclusion request?

Really appreciate the time you've spent responding to this thread Michael, thanks a lot!

[Michael Martinez]

All in one seo is noindexing categories and achieves, I have turned that feature off. It was never a problem in the past.

We don't know if it was or not. I can tell you that SEO Theory ran with that plug-in for about six months before I discovered our Sr. Web Admin had installed it without telling me. I spent six months trying to get the category pages to rank and kept wondering what was going on.

Once I learned what the plug-in did, I started looking at other sites with crawl/index issues. Many were also using the plug-in.

Those category and archive pages are important, particularly because they are often the only linking pages deep content has.

Do you think i should go with a re inclusion request?

Really appreciate the time you've spent responding to this thread Michael, thanks a lot!

I think you should reconsider your site navigation. I only looked at the site for about 10 minutes. I don't have much time to spend looking over sites these days.

So far all I can determine is that you seem to have a crawl/indexing issue. That may or may not be the reason why you've lost rankings. But eliminating that issue can tell us something.

If you are publishing new posts on the blog every day (rather than pages) then you should see some sort of change within a week IF THE PROBLEM IS DUE TO CRAWL.

If you see no change after a week of publishing new posts, then the problem is most likely something else.

If I get a chance I'll try to look at your backlinks but you might want to review Google's backlink guidelines and think as abstractly about your backlinks as possible. Relying on my help will probably frustrate you more than anything else, as I can only spend a little time looking at any one person's problem.

And let me say here for the benefit of all that I have had to turn down several private requests for contract work. I really am not looking for clients here on PAL. My schedule just won't permit that. I appreciate the interest but I'm not available.

I'm glad to help in the forum if I can.

[Michael Martinez]

doovde, I cannot show that this is your problem, but now that I've looked at your backlinks they do seem both weak, few, and vulnerable to me. By "vulnerable" I mean I think they have a high chance of being filtered.

Building links for an affiliate site is extremely challenging. But my feeling is that the less the site acts like an affiliate, the easier it becomes to acquire links for it.

And the links don't all have to come from gambling-related sites. In fact, I would not really focus on that kind of link building. That is too much relevance and not enough naturality. A natural link profile should include a variety of contexts.

People should look at their backlinks and estimate percentages for how many of their links fall into these exclusive categories (put a link into one and only one category). Count a link in the category that first matches it.

• Blog comments
• Site-wide links (count the site as 1 link)
• Forum signatures
• Reciprocal links
• Industry directories
• Industry forums (posts)
• Footers and margins on other sites
• Link lists (aka "signpost pages", "crawl pages", "hallways", etc.)
• Social media profile pages
• Forum profile pages
• Free articles
• Press releases

These are not necessarily "bad neighborhoods". Nonetheless, if more than 5% of your links fall into any of these categories, you probably need to obtain need links from resources OTHER than the types of links I've listed above.

These are all easy links to obtain. Easy links are easily abused, easily filtered, and usually don't provide much value.

If a Website moderates its user-generated content without using "rel='nofollow'" and if it doesn't allow many outbound links, then the links may be worth having regardless of how you obtained them.

What kind of links do you want to obtain?

• Links from high-traffic sites (topic doesn't matter)
• Links embedded in substantial copy (it can be multi-topic)
• Links from non-commercial sites
• Links from "picky" or "stingy" sites (they don't link to just anyone)
• Links from sites that don't rely on user-generated content
• Links that use natural anchor text (if all your links use your keywords, you're doing it wrong)
• Links on Web pages a conservative parent would allow a 10-year-old child to look at
• Links that offer a compelling reason for a real person to click on them

There is no magic formula. There are no absolute guarantees. There are no perfect links. It's not really the links that are the problem. The problem for 99.99% of all search-challenged sites is the way you obtain your links.

It's easy to get lists of easy-to-obtain linking resources. You should compile such lists for one reason and one reason only: to understand where NOT to obtain your links.

You'll sacrifice SOME link value in the short term but in the long term you'll learn how to acquire higher value links and how to cultivate really good linking resources.

You don't need links from CNN to succeed. A simple, ugly, unfocused blog can be your best friend. A really glitzy, well-designed, frequently updated "media-style" site can do wonders for you, too.

But when your link building follows too narrow a path you're putting your eggs all into one basket.

I understand that not everyone and his brother wants to link to a poker affiliate site. But believe me when I say, everyone will link to a site with great information that provides entertaining and informative content.

The affiliate community has done really well to accept the premise that every site needs content -- unfortunately I'm not seeing a lot of good content on affiliate sites in general. The content is not supposed to be for the search engines -- it's supposed to be for the people who visit the sites.

If every article on your site is a pitch page, if every page on your site offers a signup form, if everything your site is about is transforming visitors into signups, you're sending very strong signal to your visitors about low quality intentions and service. Some people will sign up anyway but they're not linking to your Websites, are they?

If you can work toward two conversions, you'll benefit more in the long run. Of course you want the signups -- but you also want people to link to your sites. That makes your job much easier. People link to what they like. They link to sites they want to be associated with.

You want your Website to be the girlfriend and the wife, not the mistress or the one night stand. Does that make sense? I hope I'm not offending anyone with that metaphor. I'm just trying to make what I feel is a very important point.