Jill,

We corresponded about 2 years ago when I responded to something in one of your newsletters, and I wonder if you can help me now.

My site, which is full of good content (1500 or so pages), was dropped by Google 3 months ago. We are a small business and as a result we are close to going out of business (we rely on advertising revenue).

The only thing I can think of is that we have the co.uk as well as the .com version of the site that is a duplicate originally produced for back-up reasons. Is it possible Google would exclude one from the index? I am quite happy to sacrifice .co.uk if it is, since all external links were to .com, but at the moment it is keeping us afloat.

Also is there any way at all I can get Google's attention?

I have emailed Google, written to them, etc. but the organisation seems impenetrable and I cannot find a way to get a useful answer - I did get one answer which simply stated:

"Your page has been blocked from our index because it does not meet the quality standards necessary to assign accurate PageRank. We cannot comment on the individual reasons your page was removed."

However, it is the whole site that has gone, not just one page.

Grateful for your advice.

Kind Regards,

Tony

Jill's Response

Hi Tony,

Yes, the engines would show only one instance of your site instead of both the .com and the co.uk, as there's no reason for them to have duplicates in the results.

You'll want to set up a 301-redirect from the .co.uk domain to the .com one, and that should help you out. There are lots of threads at my forum about this if you're unsure how to do it. Since Google said they have blocked you, you'll want to also file a reinclusion request with them and let them know what you did to take action. This all assumes that you haven't actually done anything spammy, because if you have, you'll have to clean it up completely before you apply for reinclusion.

There's also a new thread pinned at the forum that Randy, one of our moderators, put together with all the search engines' contact info. You can find it here: (http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=19320).

Good luck!

Jill

Tony's Follow-up Questions

Jill,

Thank you so much for taking the time to reply. First time I have felt there is anyone listening!

If I do the 301 redirect is there any guarantee Google will re-index the .com site? Or does it need me to take other action to try and get it re-included?

What I am terrified of is redirecting and then finding .co.uk is no longer in the index but .com doesn't get back in and we end up even worse off with no Google traffic at all.

The thing that disturbs me is that looking at the log file analysis across the few days either side of the New Year, Googlebot had 1200+ hits on the .co.uk site but just 1 hit on the .com site - which I naively assume means .com is flagged in some way as being excluded. Am I reading this correctly?

Sorry for these supplementary questions -- I'm conscious of your valuable time and I don't want to abuse your goodwill in replying to me.

Kind Regards,

Tony

Jill's Reply

Hi Tony,

There are never any guarantees of anything, but the 301 should do the trick for you if you truly haven't done anything deceptive. There could definitely be some lag time, though, and you're going to have to have patience.

I would suggest simply biting the bullet and doing it. Eventually, it will all work out as it is supposed to as long as you really haven't done anything besides having the same domain with 2 different URLs (which is not a deceptive thing, but a very common one). Also, if there are indeed any links pointing to the .co.uk URL be sure to get as many of them changed over to the .com if you can. That will help speed things along.

Do it sooner rather than later, as the sooner you do it, the sooner the .com will start getting indexed again.

Jill

Discuss this article in the Small Business Ideas forum.