Don't miss a single post about Developing your Niche Store or Website! Subscribe today and start Making Money!
December 3, 2008
It’s a well known fact that ALL Build a Niche Store owners can verify, Google is not too fond of thin sites! We have all seen many of our sites dropped from the index, including several that have above and beyond the normal point and click sites! Dave (Soggy Dave for those who don’t know him) wrote about it yesterday, in a piece about Google throwing out the baby with the bathwater. He is just one of many of us who are digging into this and trying to find out what can be done to make the most out of the software!
There was a time, less than 45 days ago… that I completely gave up on BANS and started focusing on other projects. As you will read at the end of this post, I decided that this was NOT the right answer for both myself or any of you, and when I launched the Hybrid Golf site last month, I decided I owed it to all of us to do the same with the BANS software, and compare my results! No WordPress on the site… just a BANS site, with a bit of customization.
If you were looking for the golden answer to why sites are being deindexed, you have come to the wrong place! The truth is… we can all make educated guesses, but until someone from Google steps up and says “This is Why…” (which will never happen) nobody will ever know the exact reason. One thing for sure, it’s more than a manual review at this point, as it would take quite a team of reviewers to find and deindex so many sites in such a short time!
One of the things that caught Dave’s eye, was the text that is common to all sites. Things like “Time Left” and others like “See more Item on eBay”, could be built into the G algorithm, and used to flag sites for further review. From that point, an engineer could review several of the sites in the flagged queue, find additional common ground between all of the sites, and ultimately tell the search index to ignore these sites. Dave is definitely on the right track in narrowing down what may be causing the flags in the Google Algorithm, so I started checking my own sites… looking for the common ground!
What I found was not dramatic, but there are several things to consider when you review your own. In my case, I have several BANS 3.0 sites with common text deindexed. BUT… at the same time, I have some 1.3 and 2.0 sites, with the same exact text that are still in the index!
We have all heard this 100 times… focus on the content and you will be fine right? Maybe not! Many of us have tons of unique content on our sites, yet they were still dropped. Which led me to look at the sites still in the index, versus those that were dropped! Between Kim and Myself, we started with “many” sites… and have cut it back to less than 20, some by choice… others by the deindex nightmare!
Varying Factors among Dropped Sites
Common Factors on Dropped Sites
While there may be other common and different factors such as the paypal icons, ebay links etc… within just a few hours, I narrowed the ONE common factor to all of my sites that have been dropped…. they ALL had BANS 3.0 on them! Literally NONE of my pre-3.0 stores are deindexed! I DO have several BANS 3.0 stores that still do quite well, but they are highly modified from the download package you get when you upgrade or buy the product new, and ALL of them have a blog on the front or backend!
Take an inventory of your own sites… do you have any BANS 2.0 stores still? If so, are they still indexed? If you want to see a few examples of the very poorly built and never updated BANS 1.3-2.0 stores I have that are still in the index, just shoot me an email and I will send back a link! If you remember one of my original How-To series from August of 2007 at the kids college fund site, you will recall that I gave away a website about Grill Auctions… the winner NEVER updated it and abandoned it shortly after giving up on BANS in early 2008. It is still BANS 2.0, still setup for CJ, and still very indexed! It also gets about 120 daily visitors still!
At the opening of this post, I mentioned that I built a new site a few weeks ago, based on the same review format of the Hybrid Golf site. The site is BANS ONLY and uses BANS 3.0 as the backend. Aside from those two factors, it is highly modified in the index.php and frontcontrol.php files. The site is Titanium-Drivers + .com (I didn’t link on purpose) and has only been publicly viewable for about 2 weeks, and never been linked from an outside source. The ONLY method I used to get the search engines to index the site was to submit the xml sitemap to each. It is listed in my Google tools account, etc.
While I cannot say with 100% certainty that the newest version of BANS (3.0) is the main reason that sites are dropped, regardless of quality… it is one of the blaring common factors! Sites that survived the algo drops, are either VERY full of unique content… or highly modified versions of the software within the php files that drive it!
In my opinion, pre 3.0 sites are still just as vulnerable in the longrun… but it was during the bans 3.0 heyday that Google stood up and took notice of Build a Niche Store. Could it be that they havetheir algo tuned for 3.0 and not previous versions? In my opinion… yes!
What is YOUR Opinion?
52 Responses to “Why Does Google Deindex a BANS Website?”
Got something to say?
Posting tweet...
Maybe! I have several 3.0 sites and all the ones with .com TLD were unaffected, while all the .info domains were de-indexed. The style and content level are all the same.
I’m interested in how your new site fares, however, the more discouraging trend is what is generally going on at eBay.
@ CRD - I have to agree about the losses at eBay! I read the report earlier this week about how badly their traffic is off, year over year.
It seems they are are not faring as well as some of the other big players in the world (Amazon, etc) as they once again go through a site restructure.
They NEVER should have abandoned their roots of “THE” online auction house!
M
Mark,
You talk in terms of deindexed. Many of my best sites are still indexed they have just fallen out of SERPS. Are we talking the same thing?
If so, BANS 3 is all of the ones that I have had affected. My best one, by far, had a blog on the backend.
Mark - Yep, all my deindexed sites are version 3.0 of BANS…not good. I’m pretty sure one of them was an upgrade as well. Needless to say I won’t be upgrading any of my pre 3 sites. Still doing some mods though to get this thing figured out.
Also, found a chart on the plummeting ebay traffic since Jan of 2007:
http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/11/ebay-traffic-plummeting
another reason us BANS users are seeing less clicks.
Google has content raters which manually screen sites to judge if they’re considered spam (thin affiliate) sites. Because this is a project run by many different individuals, it’s up to the person who views your site if it’s considered spam or not.
Did you see the leaked ‘guide for content raters’ from Google? This shed a lot of light on how google detects spam in their index.
They may, by what you explain, have an algorithm which detects the BANS sites. It’s interesting that older footprints were not detected.
This is why i use wordpress for by PHPbay sites. They don’t have a footprint thats associated with SPAM. Having said this, i have had TWO sites deindexed - they were both under construction and had no content on the auction listing pages. Clearly a manual deindex on both accounts.
All my sites built with earlier versions (1.3 and 2.0) are still indexed and doing fine - the ones with the most unique original content are doing better than the ones with little unique content, as you’d expect. It would certainly fit my experience that whatever this anti-BANS filter is, it targets 3.0 sites not earlier versions. I thought I was being lazy not getting round to updating them, turns out I might have accidentally saved myself a lot of grief!
I’ve had at least two of my sites deindexed … ironically enough (or maybe not so much) they were among the best money makers. I’ll have to look when I get home whether they were 3.0 or 2.0.
I do still get clicks and earn commisions from both sites … in fact one of them is pretty well ranked in MSN Live … but obviously it would be nice to get some love from the big G as well.
As a further experiment, I wonder if signing up for adwords, and paying for some clicks to these BANS sites for a while, might have some impact on trying to get them indexed again? … just a thought.
Todd
Mark,
Are any of the affected sites with PJN or all sites on EPN?
@ Todd -
I have had zero luck in the past 3-4 months getting anything reindexed with G. I have pulled BANS off one site completely, and they still wont reindex it.
@ Brent -
A definite mix of both… Although the few I do have with PJN, overall, don’t seem to do as well as the EPN sites. That may however be related to the fact that I stopped working on them as hard at the same time.
At least Yahoo still loves BANS sites :) traffic to my sites are increasing month after month all because of Yahoo. I never work at getting my sites reindexed at Google, it is simply too much work. Yahoo seems to favor sites that have been in their index for a year or more.
Is it possible to downgrade your 3.0 stores back to 2.0?
This subject is very confusing to me… I have bans sites (3.0) that are indexed and they have original content but poor quality… i have bans 3.0 sites that have original and quality content, attached to wordpress blogs…. I get better luck with unfinished bans stores lol.
lately a made a wordpress bans sites and the blog fails to be indexed by google but bans is fully indexed lol…. google is unreliable…
Has anyone approached the guys at BANS for their .02?
IF it is a 3.0 problem, they have more to loose than all of us combined.
I have also been trying to get a number of sites relisted with absolutely no luck. Trying to get ANYTHING from the big G is a joke. They do not care - unless you are a major pay per click customer.
My sites:
1.3 site out of the box, no content, with few backlinks - indexed in google with over 600 pages listed
3.0 sites with custom template (free from Mark) and some unique content and few backlinks - indexed
3.0 sites with custom template and some unique content and no backlinks - indexed
3.0 sites with BANS template, few backlinks, little unique content - indexed
3.0 sites with BANS template, little unique content and no backlinks - deindexed
In my case, seems to be that backlinks will help a 3.0 BANS site straight out of the box survive, as long as there is a little bit of unique content. But getting backlinks after being deindexed doesn’t seem to work as well or at least not that quickly.
I’ve made the changes Dave suggests on one of my Google deindexed sites that gets lots of Yahoo traffic. If it works I’ll trumpet it all over the place. In the meantime, not one of my phpBay based sites has been deindexed. In fact, I never, ever had a site deindexed until I converted to BANS 3.0. I converted all older BANS stores to 3.0, and some of those are still indexed even though their “thinness” quotient may be questionable. So, it’s a random thing, but doesn’t mean that 3.0 isn’t the basis for deindexing. Just because you don’t get caught doesn’t mean you’re not vulnerable.
Now that you discovered or think you discovered a possible reason for deindexing, have you tried coverting a site backwards to 2.0 or earlier and see if it gets reindexed?? Anybdy thinking of it??
Yael
Hi all,
Interesting. All of my site except 2 are upgrades from 1.2 to 2.0 to 3.0. These have never been deindexed!
My other 2 sites are versions 3.0, one is deindexed (no backlinks at all) and the other is in the index (has backlinks).
Could it be that a quality linking program (backlinks and a links page) forms a very major part of the overall answer?
I had two sites out of 25 BANS 3.0 Sites that got deindexed.
I have three sites that have BANS front ends and wordpress back ends that I can’t change and are still indexed.
I am still using BANS on a few new sites, but I’m really gun-shy about using it so I bury it in tabs instead of integrating it into the theme.
I am having decent luck using ebay-to-go widgets on Wordpress blogs.
Hey Mark! I know I sent you an email about this already but Im hoping to get my site moving.
I downloaded your flex_bans templete and everything was going well but I keep getting a MySql error (I swear I fixed something like this in the past but dont remember the fix). I followed the Bans instructions on how to install (3 times to make sure Im not misreading something) The Bans store is in a subdomain does that matter? Oh and yes I changed the CMOD and the cont.php file and made a new database with an exsisting user and linked the two. Did I do something out of order? Im sure it is an easy fix. Any help would be awesome!!!
When you were writing previously about deindexing of BANs sites I was feeling pretty bless to still have my pages indexed but that didn’t last long, about a week later I was de-indexed as well.
It really knocked me down a couple of pegs and I put BANS on the shelf and started working a few other projects as well.
I think I will finish the projects I have started and then take another look at BANS. Perhaps when my stress level drops back into the green.
one of my better performing sites: http://hopeposters.com/ - which uses a wordpress template from this site, was de-indexed a few weeks back.
while I have several older BANS sites with little content which are still indexed.
i am also looking into working on other projects to supplement my decline in BANS sales of late…
@ Mike -
Have you gone into the Google Webmaster Forums and asked for a review of the poster site? If not, you should…
It seems to be a VERY good site and should not be deindexed!
I would request reinclusion, then head to the webmaster forums (Site indexing section) and ask for a manual review… The first thing they will tell you to remove is the “Link to Us” section, which is bull… there is nothing wrong with it!
Its odd for sure… even though it is deindexed, it still shows relevant google ads. On most deindexed sites I have seen in the past, they are converted to PSA ads, versus contextual.
Mark
What I don’t get about Google de-indexing your site is that sites like amazon, eBay, etc are very well indexed, and a lot of the pages on there are low on unique - content and just a list of products. I really don’t see the problem with presenting people with a list of what deals are currently available.
I’ve talked to real people about my sites and they find something like this to be useful. It’s very disheartening to think that after you spend a lot of time to build up a site, links etc. just to have it taken down because Google doesn’t think you’re offering anything of value.
I find my 2.0 sites with manually created sitemaps doing better than 3.0 with bans created sitemaps. could this be the difference? Use google webmaster tools analyze robots.txt and see the difference.
P.S. Are you guys all using xml sitemaps, and google webmaster tools?
Mark
This is what I know. I had 36 stores deindexed all of which are BANS 3.0. I had no earlier stores because V3 was out at the time I bought the script.
Most of the stores I built in March & April are still indexed. Everything subsequently built is gone with one exception which is the spammiest domain name ever, has no content, but earns $200 per month. Unlike most of my stores which earn via Yahoo this one makes money via Google (go figure).
These stores had different templates. Some were yours, some were Soggy’s some were BANS.
Most, but not all, made use of Jonathan Legers 3 Way Links Service.
Most, but not all, were registerd with webmaster tools.
Another thing I’ve noticed is that it is virtually impossible to improve ranking. On the few occasions I’ve made it in to the top 10 the site has quickly fallen back through the serps.
I have also had two wordpress fronted BANS stores in the UK deindexed. Anything on .co.uk domain seems to get severely treated within 4 weeks.
There seems to be no way to get sites back in the index. I stripped a deindexed domain, installed wordpress and just write blog posts (6 weeks now). No ads, no products just info. Googlebot visits daily but is not reindexing the site.
I can see that Soggy is suggesting the evidence points to it being the product display layout and this is interesting. Nearly all my stores use layout 4 or 5 but I do have a layout 1 store that has been deindexed and that was the third store I ever built.
I’d love to be able to add more but I see little commonality.
Just wondering, has anyone had a deindexed site and had it reindexed?
If so, how did you do it? Please share!
Well after spending two weeks building a new Bans store and getting it indexed in a couple of days King google has done it again! Google de-indexed my site last night it took them less then a week after it was indexed to trash it. I am done with Bans as I can not afford to put the time in only to have google throw it out.
I know I am not an expert at this web stuff but I do have a good group of people who visit my site on a regular basis. They now come from yahoo, AOL and MSN I believe Google and Ebay are at War with each other and that may be part of ebays problems along with everything else going on there.
Google can say what they want but cleaning up the web by banning BAN site should be the least of their worries if have you surfed the web lately you know what I mean.
Do you think it might be for copyright violations? I always put disclaimers up. Do you guys?
@Russ - Was your BANS site standalone or with a Blog and if so, which was on the root?
Russ, it’s not unusual for a brand new site to go missing temporarily early in the game. I wouldn’t conclude that it’s been deindexed just yet. It could make a comeback very soon. The more worrisome thing is sites that have a few months of crust on them getting deindexed.
Sonia:
It was with a Bog and the Bans site was on the Root
potentmix:
I hope you are right but I have several sites that have been de-indexed now and believe that it is just a mater of time before google takes them all out.
Being new to all this web stuff is hard enough but getting a slap from google without ever getting a reason as to why is painful and discouraging
@ Russ -
Just went though my email… and the site is not deindexed, just going through some index changes. I sent you an email on it…
I agree with everyone on this post, its just too hard to nail down one single reason.
Many have sites with that same theme… half OK, half dropped. Layouts… half OK, half gone.
The variable I mentioned about it being related to BANS 3.0, is likely to be that the algo was created (if it was) to ID the 3.0 sites, versus the older versions. They too, if as popular as 3.0 was… would be just as susceptible to the same thing happening.
The ONE thing I have decided to do however… is FIND A WAY TO MAKE IT WORK!! I have way too much time and effort into BANS to see it go away on a bad note. I have a goal… to do whatever I can to make it work “OUT OF THE BOX” since that is the easiest!
Mark
thanks for the advice.. i posted a question on the google forum.
i was then harassed by a guy name Phil Payne accusing me of owning 893 domain names and having a domain farm ?? apparently he searched for my name “Michael Martin” and assumes I own every domain associated with that name ?
Anyway, I got one decent reply, and I removed the one blog post that had some duplicate content in it. Also added a nofollow to some of my amazon ads.
I’m working on some new content and then I will try to reapply.
Thanks for the feedback.
Mark
It will be great if you can figure this out I wish I could help but I just have not gained enough knowledge on the web tech talk to be of much help.
Good luck with getting Bans back to its intended purpose, which I feel, was a great way for the newbie’s to get started.
I think it would make sense to make your site as attempting to answers your clients concerns and put a mission statement on your site - rather than have it look like a script generated content.
@ Elliot -
Great topic on your linked site… I am going to be copycat soon…. I regged 3-4 domains in Sept for future development. “Turbinereviews” etc…etc.
Definitely an emerging market!!
You are spot on about taking the point/click look out of it and generating something that actually represents more of a business. I have even been looking into a dropshipping solution for a few sites.
M
Mark
Interested to hear you’ve been looking in to drop shipping. I’d like to build a genuine business site retailing specialist products. Have you found any trusted sites offering drop shipping info. This is another one of those “can of worms” areas with more misinformation than truth.
I’m really still torn on this issue. Most of my domains are several years old, so I really don’t want to see any more of them get deindexed (with no idea of what it takes to get them reincluded). On the other hands, for sites that I don’t really do anything with, BANS is by far the best and easiest way to earn a few bucks … even the sites that got deindexed by google are still producing sales every day via yahoo and msn visitors.
My real dilemma is what to do about the BANS sites that haven’t been deindexed yet (and are producing sales).
BANS is by no means my primary source of income, but it does provide a nice pool of “play” money that I can use to by things like books, themes and scripts. I don’t want to lose that in the short term, but I don’t want to ruin my domains either. Tough choice.
Todd
@ Mark - Thanks for your comments.
I’ve never had a BANs site deindexed - strangley enough!
I’ve also given up on BANs, and am leaning towards purchasing phpBay and using it with wordpress (which is a much better combination in my opinion)
my BANs site’s don’t make squat compared to my other avenues, so if they get deindexed and I loose a few bucks here and there - oh well!
@ Elijah -
Great to see you back man! I am still working on a small scale on BANS, I truly want to see what its going to take to make it work to my needs, based on the recent dislike by G. All said though, I have found the EPN as a whole, has been down on traffic… sales… etc, so I am also branching to other avenues. MUCH MORE Diversification, I guess!
M
Count me in as another reformed BANS’er….too much headache compared to Wordpress and phpBay.
I am done with BANS…..I still like EPN…but I am going to branch out as well and start including other affiliate programs and give Amazon a try.
Amazon has a MUCH MUCH deeper inventory than Ebay in my opinion…at least they do in my niches.
@Bill
As I understand it Amazon only has a 24 hr cookie so you are very limited compared to eBay.
@ Mike -
True… Amazon IS a 24 hour cookie, but the cart has a 30 day expiration. SO… if you send a user over today, they have 24 hours to make the purchase… OR add it to a cart.
After they add the item to a cart - YOU OWN the referral to that specific cart item for 30 days, or they empty the cart buy completing the purchase or deleting it.
Even if 2 days later, they find another referral link from some other affiliate and add something else to the cart, as long as they kept your referred item in the cart, you will get credit for the referral.
At least thats how I understand it to work…
So… just to clarify:
Amazon has a 24 hour cookie - Yes!
If item is added to cart - it is good for 30 days, or until the cart item is purchased or removed.
Mark
I have been using phpbay for a while now and like it a lot but decided to get BANS just yesterday (and before reading your post). You mention that your index page is “highly modified” - what kinds of things did you tweak? I’m not asking you to give away any trade secrets, but just something that may help people like me to make a BANS site that doesn’t get BANned by Google.
Thanks!
@ Nick -
Nothing major, but quite a bit more than I could list in a comment section.
There is quite a bit of errant code between the index.php and the frontcontrol.php (alot of repetitive code) that simply puts an easy to spot footprint on the sites.
Text strings like “View More Items”, “Bids”, etc just need to be removed or changed.
ANYTHING you can do to make your site different than the out of the box pages, is worth the effort.
Mark
My site was delisted back in August and just a few days after finally getting my page rank boosted to 2. I thought I was on the right track and pretty happy about it when they hammered me.After several requests for re-inclusion and no responses I’m just going to give up on Google focus my SEO on Yahoo.
What’s frustrating to me though is seeing static sites that have no content, haven’t been updated in ages, no relevant back links etc…,
still on the first or second page for my main search terms.
Happy Holidays!
Mike
I had some of my sites de-indexed due to the google updates. Especially the ones from the article directories… I’ve been experimenting with a strategy on some new bans sites and some of the bans sites that got de-indexed..
The main factor I have found in all of the experiments I have performed are all down to fresh content… and book marking and linking your content in the right way back to your store..
Happy new year to you guys..
Steve
Has anyone noticed a if there is a difference between sites that show listings on the home page. I just recently had 3 site deindexed and admittedly they were VERY thin, I just hadn’t gotten to them yet. What I did notice other than low content, all of the pages showed listings on the home page and most of my sites do not. Just a thought, I would be interested to see the numbers. I thought the sitemap suggestion was good too, that would make sense. Take care.