Proof: http://www.jabz.biz/pics/bmw-google.jpg

I checked various DC´s,...they are definately back and the still got their PR!
.....wonder how much they had to pay!

I'm sure it was a lot

doubt they paid anything. Just removed doorways and asked to be re-included. Google is a big fish but BMW is bigger one and I doubt they would want to piss them off too much.

I had a site banned for IP cloaking once, i removed cloak and it was back in index within 2 months so i dont think a ban is always permanent even for the little folk.

Originally Posted by Guerilla

Google is a big fish but BMW is bigger one and I doubt they would want to piss them off too much.

Love that sentence.

Removal of the doorway pages and a phonecall from whichever moron manages their PR (Public relations - not pagerank!!!) should've done the trick

I wouldn't mind giving Google a call another day by phone as I have two sites that has been de-listed from their results for no reason at all.

I have tried getting them back, but I have had no success and they just send automated reply emails.

try sending your emails from MD@BMW.com

I a doubt a "little guy" would be back in Google so fast after cheating.

That was the joke...

I have not cheated in anyway.

I have just put a site online and done a little seo and just advertise it. I don't make my sites for the search engines, I make them for my visitors.

I then got good rankings for about nearly 3 years and suddenly it got banned.

It is like a competitor had something to do with it.

Originally Posted by Lasso

I a doubt a "little guy" would be back in Google so fast after cheating.

John,

Do you have a URL for the banned site?

The URL is: http://www.affiliateseeking.com

The reason as far as i can see is that you are linking to a few grey barred sites. Sometimes affiliate schemes get black listed from google and linking to them can get you penalised. The good news is that its not usually a permanent ban and by removing the offending links you can usually get back in the index. The bad news is that your sites main purpose appears to be to link to these sites

This may not be the case though and you may have been removed because google thought you were a links directory. Not sure how to combat that one but I dont think its the most likely reason.

Have you ever used ip cloaking?

I have never used ip cloaking or any other forms of spam to just get a good ranking.

I have always been an honest advertiser just wanting to setup and run a long term business.

I wouldn't ever do things like cloaking as I know it is against Google's webmaster guidelines and I set up this business with an aim to make it successful and not to get banned by the search engines.

I know I probably link to other banned sites, but so does alot of other sites.

There are many of affiliate program directories on the web and they are linking to just the same ones as me plus more.

Once I have got banned from Google I had not changed my site, because as they mention "you sould make your site for your visitors and not just for the search engines" well that's what I have done. If I don't link to these bad sites then it is not really fare on the sites and it is just like I am doing it for the search engines.

Also I had another site that got banned. I then checked their webmaster guidelines and noticed that my site slighly broke one or two of them.

One was that I had more than 100 internal links on some of the pages. I then had redesigned the whole of my site as google didn't tell me exactly what was breaking the TOS.

I said up for about 20 hours each day without much sleep for about 3 days modifying everything so that I could get it all done and approved my Google that it now meets their TOS only to find that they didn't even bother adding it back to their index.

So to do all of these changes I had taken valuable links of some of the pages and put them on others instead meaning that I had just done it so that I could get into the search engine again, doing all this took up alot of my time when I should have been focusing my attentions onto something else, plus I also made it not as visitor friendly as it made it harder for my visitors to find things.

After doing all this work and telling them step by step what I have changed and improved so that it meets their webmaster guidelines, they didn't even bother adding it back.

It wouldn't be anything to do with the number of links on your pages, that's purely a guideline for making sites user friendly. and certainly not something that would cause an issue.

A quick look at the site certainly points to some kind of penalty, though I think the root of the problem comes from the sites that link to you. It looks like you have gone the route of just getting links for the sake of it. This search shows that the vast majority of sites that mention yours (They may or may not be links) are in the supplemental index, so are not seen as "important" and do not pass link credit.
Combine this with the points that Guerrilla mentioned and you have a classic case where the "crap" factors outweigh anything else and the site is dropped.

Does the Googlebot still visit the site and how often?

Sites linking to your domain wont get you banned (unless possibly they originate from the same ip address). Sites that your domain links to can get you banned.

If google doesnt want a website to be found then they will penalise all sites that link to that site.

A few links tend to be overlooked and generally just effect the ranking of the page the link is on, but when you have too many the whole site is effected.

I would suggest removing your reciprocal links directory for the timebeing (optional) and going to http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py and using their enquiry form to say that you have removed some links from your site and re-designed it and that you will make sure never to stray from the google TOS again. Site should then get scheduled for a review but from what i hear you will still be waiting a while before you find out if your re-included.

I guess we will have to do that then. Do you all think that my links directory is the main thing that could be causing this?

I also have a web directories on another site aswell that got banned from Google and it is a reciprocal links directory.

I know linking to poor sites is a bad idea, but it is really hard to not link to some of them. This is because if you have over 1000 links on your site then checking them on a regular basis just to see if they have been banned from google will take a very long time.

Come to think about it, I also have a links directorie on two other sites that include roughly the same links as this banned site that you have looked at and them two are still in Google.

i run links directories on some of my sites but as a rule i dont link to sites without a toolbar pagerank value. Linkmachine (www.linkmachine.net) can check for links to sites with no pagerank and should help find sites that have been banned easily (only on links added to directory). I also start by building as many related links as possible.

If you do use linkmachine make sure you customise the template. I have heard people saying that google detects the html these scripts generates and penalises sites for it but i think thats probably just for the fully automated exchanges as i have had no problem with this script and others that i use on high ranking sites.

I have taken a look at the links directory. I have check about 20 links and out of them all only 2 had a 0 PR and on of them was not in Google.

All the rest mainly had PR2 - PR7

So I was just wondering if that is not the reason for me being banned. I have about 300 - 500 links in this directory which I didn't check them all. But I think a large marjority of them have a PR2+.

Does anybody know what percentage of links you need to link to that have been banned from Google before you get banned.

I think I am linking to less than 5% of banned sites you see. Infact you could be around 2%

Evidence leads towards the links to the affilliate schemes u link to. I checked first few links and found 2 pr 0's which mean sit may have been banned. drastic measures could be to remove all links to sites that are pr0

I don't directly link to these affiliate programs though. I use a "linkid=325" etc. And I thought that the search engines can't follow that.

What about if I keep all of the affiliate programs and just change the way that I link to them by changing the "?linkid=325" to "?id=325" as I found in the Webmaster Guidelines or somewhere else on their site that they don't follow the "?id=325"

Would that be the best way. I ask this because although some of the affiliate programs may have got a PR0 they are still good programs. If I take these programs out of my site then I will have even less programs than what I have now and it was only a while back where I had take a lot of them out as I cleaned my database of old and expired sites.

Snippet from Googles Guidelines
-----------------------------------
Do not use "&id=" as a parameter in your URLs, as we do not include these pages in our index.