I launched a site several weeks ago and, despite being crawled by Google, the site was never indexed.
I waited patiently and built up links with other sites, thinking that Google just takes a while to get around to it. I then discovered that one of the sites I requested a link with had apparently set up a url which was redirecting to my site, rather than using a hyperlink. Since this might be interpreted as a cloaking attempt on my part, I got the link removed.
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I finally wrote to google about this and here is the reply I received:
Thank you for your note. Your page has been blocked from our index becauseit does not meet the quality standards necessary to assign accurate PageRank. We cannot comment on the individual reasons your page was removed. However, certain actions such as cloaking, writing text in such a
way that it can be seen by search engines but not by users, or setting up pages/links with the sole purpose of fooling search engines may result in permanent removal from our index. Please read our webmaster guidelines at
http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html for more information.
Regards,
The Google Team
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The only other things that I can think of are:
When I first launched the site, I was using too many keyword in the meta tags and in the image alt tags. These have since been revised.
I have a few pages on the server that are not linked from within the site. These pages contain semi-confidential info. and when I want someone to access these files, I send them the url of these pages.
Perhaps this is in violation of Google's guide which says that "every page should be accessible from at least one text link".
I am using the osc "All Prods" contribution. However, I have the all prods link clearly displayed at the bottom of my home page. It's not hidden or disguised in any way).
So, basically, the site is now free of anything questionable, as far as I know. Does anyone know what else might be causing google to block my site? Once a site is blocked, is it typically easy to get it unblocked, or is forever "tainted" and I should now just get a new domain name and server?