undefined
Skip to content
Moz logo Menu open Menu close
  • Products
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Pro Home
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Home
    • STAT
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Home
    • Compare SEO Products
    • Moz Data
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis
    • Keyword Explorer
    • Link Explorer
    • Competitive Research
    • MozBar
    • More Free SEO Tools
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO
    • SEO Learning Center
    • Moz Academy
    • SEO Q&A
    • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Digital Marketers
    • Agency Solutions
    • Enterprise Solutions
    • Small Business Solutions
    • The Moz Story
    • New Releases
  • Log in
  • Log out
  • Products
    • Moz Pro

      Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

    • Moz Local

      Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

    • STAT

      SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

    • Moz API

      Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

    • Compare SEO Products

      See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

    • Moz Data

      Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
    Moz Pro

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

    Learn more
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis

      Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

    • Keyword Explorer

      Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

    • Link Explorer

      Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

    • Competitive Research

      Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

    • MozBar

      See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

    • More Free SEO Tools

      Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
    Moz Pro

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

    Learn more
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO

      The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

    • SEO Learning Center

      Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

    • On-Demand Webinars

      Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

    • How-To Guides

      Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

    • Moz Academy

      Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

    • MozCon

      Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
    Moz API

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

    Find your plan
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Digital Marketers

      Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

    • Small Business Solutions

      Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

    • Agency Solutions

      Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

    • Enterprise Solutions

      Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

    • The Moz Story

      Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

    • New Releases

      Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

    Surface actionable competitive intel
    New Feature

    Surface actionable competitive intel

    Learn More
  • Log in
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Dashboard
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Dashboard
    • Moz Academy
  • Avatar
    • Moz Home
    • Notifications
    • Account & Billing
    • Manage Users
    • Community Profile
    • My Q&A
    • My Videos
    • Log Out

The Moz Q&A Forum

  • Forum
  • Questions
  • Users
  • Ask the Community

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

  1. Home
  2. SEO Tactics
  3. Technical SEO
  4. Why is my website banned?

Moz Q&A is closed.

After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

Why is my website banned?

Technical SEO
6
12
2.6k
Loading More Posts
  • Oldest to Newest
  • Newest to Oldest
  • Most Votes
Reply
  • Reply as question
Log in to reply
This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
  • tadden
    tadden last edited by Oct 6, 2011, 2:56 PM

    IMy website is Costume Machine at www.costumemachine.com . My site has been banned for 1 year now. I have requested that google reconsider my site 3 times without luck.

    The site is dynamic and basically pulls in feeds from affiliate sites. We have added over 1,500 pages of original content. The site has been running great since 2008 without any penalties. I don't think I got hit with any linking penalty. I cleaned up all questionable links last November when the penalty hit.

    Am I being hit with a "thin" site penalty? If that is the issue what is the best way to fix the problem?

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
    • tadden
      tadden @irvingw last edited by Oct 17, 2011, 12:21 PM Oct 17, 2011, 12:21 PM

      I recieved this Google reply to my latest reconsideration request. Maybe you can gather some insight from their resonse. I'm trying to decide if its a content issue or a linking issue google is taking exception to with my site. Any insight would be appreciated.

      Thanks,

      Todd

      Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.costumemachine.com/,

      We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www.costumemachine.com/ for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

      We've reviewed your site and we believe that some or all of your pages still violate our quality guidelines.

      In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from http://www.costumemachine.com/ may not appear or may not rank as highly in Google's search results, or may otherwise be considered to be less trustworthy than sites which follow the quality guidelines.

      If you wish to be reconsidered again, please correct or remove all pages that are outside our quality guidelines. When such changes have been made, please visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?hl=en and resubmit your site for reconsideration.

      If you have additional questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.

      Sincerely,

      Google Search Quality

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • topic:timeago_earlier,11 days
      • AlanMosley
        AlanMosley @GrouchyKids last edited by Oct 6, 2011, 11:02 PM Oct 6, 2011, 11:02 PM

        I believe they report when you have malwae or been hacked, but not when uyou have been flaged

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • KeriMorgret
          KeriMorgret last edited by Oct 6, 2011, 9:59 PM Oct 6, 2011, 9:59 PM

          When I go to google and search [costumemachine.com] your site is the first result and it has six sitelinks.

          When you are looking at your metrics for the last year and comparing it to times prior, what is it that you see has changed? Are you doing OK in organic Bing and Yahoo and just having problems with Google?

          That said, I'm having a very hard time finding 15 pages of original content, much less 1,500 pages of original content. Like others have mentioned, the tags and filters seem to be off. When I'm looking at 1st Birthday Costumes, the list of other 1st birthday costumes includes a hot dog adult link, as well as links that have no results (covenant slayer faith). Correction: now that I look more carefully at the page, it says nothing found for 1st birthday party theme, even though I clicked a link there, so it's just showing me random stuff for adults.

          Like the others mentioned, I'm having a hard time seeing the value of this site to a user. Google wants people to have a good experience when a user finds a site, and there are other sites in this area that do a better job.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • gfiorelli1
            gfiorelli1 last edited by Oct 6, 2011, 6:27 PM Oct 6, 2011, 6:25 PM

            Hi Todd,

            IMO you're intuition is right and Irving is saying a correct thing in the first point.

            I too have noticed that you have pagination issues and that all the paginated urls have the same title html, substantially the same content. I suggest you to not let SE to index the paginated pages using "meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow". That way you will resolve a good number of duplication issues.

            About thin content... yes, the content describing the categories and sub categories would not win the Pulitzer. Try to be more original and apply the content curation practice in order craft exceptional category description.

            One thing I don't like of your site - without offence - is the fact that it is clearly an affiliate site: to click on a product and find myself directly sent to product page on the real site is not really giving me a great impression. Therefore, and you have nothing to loose after a 1 year buried in the serps, I would start reconsidering an integral re-definition of the site.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • irvingw
              irvingw @tadden last edited by Oct 6, 2011, 5:14 PM Oct 6, 2011, 5:14 PM

              How many times did you submit for reconsideration? When was the last time, did you give specific examples of what you fixed?

              I assume most of the link building was done to your homepage? If so, download all links pointing to your homepage with GWMT and use this tool to go through them one at a time.

              http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/text-link-tool.htm

              a) If you see a site that looks shady reach out to the webmaster and tell him you need the site removed. Keep a record so you can follow up. Shady means links to adult, casino and med sites.

              b) Remove any sitewide links pointing to your site

              c) remove any sites linking to you that are penalized in Google

              Time consuming process, but as you make progress you can submit reconsideration requests periodically explaining what steps you are taking to come back into compliance. Admit that you were link building and that you fired your SEO guy right away. Explain the steps you are taking to reverse the damage he did and how it really affected your business. Promise to not engage in link building again - be humble and appreciative.

              Sometimes you need to fix and fix and submit 4 or 5 times before Google releases the penalty.

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • tadden
                tadden @irvingw last edited by Oct 6, 2011, 4:16 PM Oct 6, 2011, 4:16 PM

                I know the timing for this site is horrible. I am interested in your help if you can help me identify the exact cause of the penalty. If it is a link penalty I'd like to be able to pinpoint the link or links Google dislikes and fix them.

                irvingw 1 Reply Last reply Oct 6, 2011, 5:14 PM Reply Quote 0
                • tadden
                  tadden @GrouchyKids last edited by Oct 6, 2011, 4:14 PM Oct 6, 2011, 4:14 PM

                  I have check Google Webmaster and I can't find anything that tells me why I'm being penalized. If you know exactly where please let me know.

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • irvingw
                    irvingw last edited by Oct 6, 2011, 4:17 PM Oct 6, 2011, 3:59 PM

                    1. Duplicate content is not a penalty, but a filter so Google could theoretically let only one of these pages rank:

                    http://www.costumemachine.com/costume/adult-costumes/sexy/1

                    all the way to 113 are very similar

                    http://www.costumemachine.com/costume/adult-costumes/sexy/113

                    1. How is santa getting classifies as a Jew costume lol

                    http://www.costumemachine.com/keyword/jew/1

                    1. It's not really a "search engine on more than 20 costume sites" is it, more like a affiliate site for buycostumes.com - just a personal observation, has nothing to do with penalty 😉

                    Anyway, having flimsy content is not something that would get you a trademark suppression so my guess is that these is still something with your incoming links that Google doesn't like. Were you ranking well before? Sucks, this is your time of the year I could have helped you possibly recover if you reached out a few months ago.

                    tadden 2 Replies Last reply Oct 17, 2011, 12:21 PM Reply Quote 1
                    • irvingw
                      irvingw @AlanMosley last edited by Oct 6, 2011, 4:17 PM Oct 6, 2011, 3:34 PM

                      Correct, the site is not banned but it IS penalized. Banned means completely removed from Google's index...game over. Penalized means indexed but rankings have been suppressed.

                      As you can see your name is not ranking when searching Google, this is a trademark suppression and almost always means the entire site has been penalized.

                      http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.costumemachine.com&hl=en&prmd=imvns&ei=OPCNTraCNI-HrAeCh8SmAQ&start=30&sa=N&biw=1920&bih=888&cad=cbv&sei=DvSNTsybHMbYrQeuvcijAQ#sclient=psy-ab&hl=en&biw=1920&bih=888&source=hp&q="costumemachine"&pbx=1&oq="costumemachine"&aq=f&aqi=g-l2g-v1g-lv1&aql=&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=3619l6784l0l7009l16l13l0l0l0l0l621l4828l2-2.5.2.3l12l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.,cf.osb&fp=334e87e3bc984f2f

                      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                      • GrouchyKids
                        GrouchyKids last edited by Oct 6, 2011, 3:20 PM Oct 6, 2011, 3:20 PM

                        Have you checked Google Webmaster Tools, they now report penalisation I believe.

                        tadden AlanMosley 2 Replies Last reply Oct 6, 2011, 11:02 PM Reply Quote 0
                        • AlanMosley
                          AlanMosley last edited by Oct 6, 2011, 3:11 PM Oct 6, 2011, 3:11 PM

                          I just checked and you are in both bing and google

                          irvingw 1 Reply Last reply Oct 6, 2011, 3:34 PM Reply Quote 0
                          • 1 / 1
                          1 out of 12
                          • First post
                            1/12
                            Last post

                          Got a burning SEO question?

                          Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                          Start my free trial


                          Browse Questions

                          Explore more categories

                          • Moz Tools

                            Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

                          • SEO Tactics

                            Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

                          • Community

                            Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

                          • Digital Marketing

                            Chat about tactics outside of SEO

                          • Research & Trends

                            Dive into research and trends in the search industry.

                          • Support

                            Connect on product support and feature requests.

                          • See all categories

                          Related Questions

                          • Dan_Tala

                            My website is constantly decreasing

                            loss of ranking

                            For few weeks ago my website is constantly decreasing in search position. I lost keywords and is gooooing down.
                            Although it is well rated on several on page and off page seo verification software that I have tried.
                            I checked Google search console and Analytics and found no major problems. However… from one day to another it keeps going down.
                            I also checked what the main competitors are doing and they are not doing well, at all.
                            The main competitor actually has a creepy website. Totally devoid of onpage or offpage SEO but with an enormous number of backlinks. And of a very bad quality, which should disqualify it, still…
                            Few weeks ago I changed something.
                            In the pages I had H1, 4xH2, no H3 and an H4 without content.
                            An unnatural H tag structure.
                            Now I have H1, H2, H3, 3xH4, with the coherent information.
                            Theoretically, Google should have been “happy” or I’m missing something. I use a SAAS platform.
                            I just found out that they made changes to the keywords (tags).
                            I am selling toner cartridges for printers.
                            So…
                            The tags are printer models and generate a url in which they have the products.
                            Ex. https://www.sertit.ro/cartus-imprimanta-cilindru-color-hp-laserjet-pro-m-177fw goes to the products for that printer model.
                            The question is… should I make tag canonical?
                            Is it possible for products to loose so much in Google search?

                            Technical SEO | Feb 17, 2024, 7:35 AM | Dan_Tala
                            0
                          • SpodekandCo

                            Is there a way to get a list of all pages of your website that are indexed in Google?

                            I am trying to put together a comprehensive list of all pages that are indexed in Google and have differing opinions on how to do this.

                            Technical SEO | Oct 31, 2019, 8:15 AM | SpodekandCo
                            0
                          • Jane.com

                            Will Google crawl and rank our ReactJS website content?

                            We have 250+ products dynamically inserted and sorted on our site daily (more specifically our homepage... yes, it's a long page). Our dev team would like to explore rendering the page server-side using ReactJS. We currently use a CDN to cache all the content, which of course we would like to continue using. SO... will Google be able to crawl that content? We've read some articles with different ideas (including prerendering): http://andrewhfarmer.com/react-seo/
                            http://www.seoskeptic.com/json-ld-big-day-at-google/ If we were to only load the schema important to the page  (like product title, image, price, description, etc.) from the server and then let the client render the remaining content (comments, suggested products, etc.), would that go against best practices? It seems like that might be seen as showing the googlebot 1 version and showing the site visitor a different (more complete) version.

                            Technical SEO | May 24, 2016, 8:33 AM | Jane.com
                            0
                          • renukishor

                            How to inform Google to remove 404 Pages of my website?

                            Hi, I want to remove more than 6,000 pages of my website because of bad keywords, I am going to drop all these pages and making them ‘404’ I want to know how can I inform google that these pages does not exists so please don’t send me traffic from those bad keywords? Also want to know can I use disavow tool of google website to exclude these 6,000 pages of my own website?

                            Technical SEO | Sep 8, 2014, 1:09 PM | renukishor
                            4
                          • ngupta1

                            How to display the full structure of website on Google serps

                            I have been searching around but unable to gather information as to how we can control or list  top pages of a website on Google's first page , i.e. if we type seomoz in google , we can see the main listing with 6 subdomain listings , which link to Blog , Seo tool , Beginner Seo guide , Learn Seo , Pricing & Plans and login My question is can we control these listings i.e. what to display and what not , and if yes how can we make this type of visibility on first page , by using html or xml sitemaps or theirs something mostly websites are missing. Cause this type of data is coming up for very less websites and mostly websites are with single urls. c43Ki.jpg

                            Technical SEO | Jan 16, 2013, 4:05 AM | ngupta1
                            0
                          • Alick300

                            Two websites with similar products

                            I have two websites with similar products with different tld.I have a keywords that is comman in both.One site is at top in google with that keyword and one is not.Can we implement 301 redirect from one domain to another domain for that keyword or google will consider it spammy?Please help me out.

                            Technical SEO | Jul 3, 2012, 4:09 AM | Alick300
                            0
                          • slangdon

                            Google is Showing Website as "Untitled"

                            My freelance designer made some changes to my website and all of a sudden my homepage was showing the title I have in Dmoz. We thought maybe the NOODP tag was not correct, so we edited that a little and now the site is showing as "Untitled". The website is http://www.chemistrystore.com/. Of course he didn't save an old copy that we can revert to. That is a practice that will end. I have no idea why the title and description that we have set for the homepage is not showing in google when it previously was. Another weird thing that I noticed is that when I do ( site:chemistrystore.com ) in Google I get the https version of the site showing with the correct title and description. When I do ( site:www.chemistrystore.com ) in Google I don't have the hompage showing up from what I can tell, but there are 4,000+ pages to the site. My guess is that if it is showing up, it is showing up as "Untitled". My question is.... How can we get Google to start displaying the proper title and description again?

                            Technical SEO | Feb 2, 2012, 7:47 PM | slangdon
                            0
                          • seoidea

                            Has google panelized us ? If so, why ? How do I know if our website is panelized ?

                            We were ranked on first page among top 5 position a year ago for most of our pages. On one fine day, google decided to drop us from the results although google keeps indexing our pages. Google index our pages regularly but doesn't show them in its results. All google traffic we receive is for our own site name and its variations. I wanted to know - how do we know if google has panelized us. Why has google panelized us ? If they have panelized us, what can we do to get out of it ? Also I wanted to know if any tool will help me identify such thing. We have not done any link building. Our site page rank is 4 (it was 5 few months ago). All we did was on page optimization. Thanks for your help!

                            Technical SEO | Jun 30, 2011, 8:53 AM | seoidea
                            0

                          Get started with Moz Pro!

                          Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                          Start my free trial
                          Products
                          • Moz Pro
                          • Moz Local
                          • Moz API
                          • Moz Data
                          • STAT
                          • Product Updates
                          Moz Solutions
                          • SMB Solutions
                          • Agency Solutions
                          • Enterprise Solutions
                          Free SEO Tools
                          • Domain Authority Checker
                          • Link Explorer
                          • Keyword Explorer
                          • Competitive Research
                          • Brand Authority Checker
                          • Local Citation Checker
                          • MozBar Extension
                          • MozCast
                          Resources
                          • Blog
                          • SEO Learning Center
                          • Help Hub
                          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                          • How-to Guides
                          • Moz Academy
                          • API Docs
                          About Moz
                          • About
                          • Team
                          • Careers
                          • Contact
                          Why Moz
                          • Case Studies
                          • Testimonials
                          Get Involved
                          • Become an Affiliate
                          • MozCon
                          • Webinars
                          • Practical Marketer Series
                          • MozPod
                          Connect with us

                          Contact the Help team

                          Join our newsletter
                          Moz logo
                          © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                          • Accessibility
                          • Terms of Use
                          • Privacy

                          Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.