Why does Google shut your account down ?

20 Jan 12 12:56 am

Hi Chantelle,

If you are referring to Adwords, yes, they can and will ban your adwords account if your site does not follow the Terms of Service. Read it.

For organic search results, they can lower your ranking so that no one finds you or completely remove your site from their index. Usually a result of blackhat SEO techniques (trying to game Google).

The reason for both of these is that Google is in the business of providing a user experience and must keep the quality of that experience as high as possible for the end user.

20 Jan 12 4:48 pm

Hi Chantelle,

Do they simply put your site offline ? What are the practical results of having your account closed down ?

Google can either de-index your site meaning it will no longer appear on their result pages or they can lower your rank which means it would be less likely for a user to find your pages.

Secondly , WHY would they close your account down. I have several sites hosted on similar domains with the content basically rewritten, and very similar .. would this be a reason for shutting ALL my sites down ?

It's usually for duplicate content or low-quality content but they will not shut your site down. What they will do is lower your ranking or remove your site from the SERPs. They don't slam down sites for duplicate content alone. There are other factors. You might want to go over these Google Webmaster pages:

Google Webmaster - Duplicate Content
Site not doing well in search

Is having a number of similar sites hosted on different domains a black hat technique ?

Black hat techniques would usually be buying links or exchanging links or using automated systems to spam sites with your website's URL, etc.

I don't think you run the risk of getting de-indexed by having similar sites unless you use those sites to funnel traffic to a single website that sells something to users.

Google is into providing quality content to users so make sure your sites, while similar, offer high quality and informative articles to visitors.

Hope that helps. Have a good weekend!

20 Apr 12 3:25 pm

Google to me is an odd duck, they always talk about good user experience but I see so many crappy sites on page one that I think how is this a good user experience. Some giant sites like Amazon only follow it's own rules because google always want good content meaning good articles about a product or something in that nature but the few times I have been on Amazon all I see are lists of products for sale, sometimes there is a description of the product but that is from the person selling it on Amazon not Amazon itself. So to me it is always strange when you read google quality guidelines because the don't seem to be for everyone. Most of us have to have good articles about our subject and others don't. But in some cases a site shouldn't need any articles. If you are selling nuts and bolts for your own company why would you need articles or stories about nuts and bolts, all you need are part lists. So the answer isn't simple google is an odd company who always changes things when it feels like it. From what I know as long as you have well written articles on your site on your subject and don't have a dozen affiliate links everywhere and have links from sites that are related subject wise to your site you should be fine.