TKG SEO Blog

It’s day 10 and roughly 12 hours since tkg.com was removed from the blacklist…

Google is now indexing tkg.com (GWT must be delayed) - currently, Google is seeing 15 tkg.com pages - what a sign of relief. It’s not over yet…Google still has about 400 more pages to index, has to stop ranking thekarchergroup.com and *fingers crossed*, bring our site back to ranking well for some of our top referring & converting phrases…for now, I’m relieved! 

I logged into tkg.com’s Google Webmaster Tools account this morning and found that we’re still not showing up…

Last night around 6:30pm we were informed that our domain was being removed from the ws.surbl.org blacklist…

So now what? We watch Google to see if being removed from the blacklist gets tkg.com back in Google.

Day 9:

• TKG.com is still blacklisted; however, we’ve been communicating with the necessary folks and are making some strides in getting this resolved.

• Haven’t heard back yet from our reconsideration request (Google says this may take several weeks)

• Yahoo! & MSN rankings are holding steady

• Yahoo! is now indexing 271 TKG.com pages (up from 125 3 days ago)

If you think your site has been banned, complete the following search in Google using your domain instead of ‘tkg.com’ [site:www.tkg.com] - if you see the image below, your site might be banned.

If your domain is brand new - relax, it’s going to take a bit of time…

Make sure that your site is only implementing ethical SEO techniques and that your entire site adheres to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Once you’re sure your site meets the guidelines, be prepared to plead your case to Google in the form of a reconsideration request. Follow the instructions & include your contact information. Below is what we sent to Google:

Thank you in advance for taking the time to review this reconsideration request.

The Karcher Group just recently purchased www.tkg.com and after utilizing Google Webmaster Tools (sitemap, robots.txt, etc) and still not being indexed by Google after 1 week, we did some investigating and found that the domain we just bought (www.tkg.com) has been blacklisted for being mentioned within spam emails (SURBLs).

I can assure you that The Karcher Group (formerly www.thekarchergroup.com) does not participate in any email spamming schemes and adheres to all of Google’s guidelines. www.tkg.com does not violate any of Google’s quality guidelines and will always abide by Google’s quality guidelines in the future.

We appreciate that Google takes spam seriously and thank you for reviewing our reconsideration request.

Jennifer Geh
jen@tkg.com

The Karcher Group
5590 Lauby Road Suite 8
North Canton, Ohio 44720
330-493-6141

Now…we wait and see if Google reacts

So…if your domain is being crawled by Googlebot, there aren’t any red flags coming up in Google Webmaster Tools and your domain still isn’t showing up in Google’s search results - your site might be banned!

Well whatta ya know? Investigation by our fabulous IT team last night found that our newly purchased domain (not to be confused with our IP address) was previously blacklisted and still on the list! Apparently, www.tkg.com was being referenced/linked in the body of spam emails.

So now what?
The blacklist our new domain is on is manually maintained, so we’re following protocol & hoping with Dustin’s charm that this is resolved before the end of the week.

Now we need to get back in Google’s good graces so they stop ignoring tkg.com. Next: Google’s Reconsideration Request

Corey & I have been brainstorming this afternoon about how to get Google to index the new domain.
What we know so far…

1. Via AW Stats, we know that Googlebot has been to www.tkg.com numerous times over the last few days
2. Via Google Webmaster Tools, we know that the robots.txt was downloaded at 10am this morning (day 6)
3. Google rankings are dropping off
4. Via GMT, we know that the sitemap was downloaded late yesterday afternoon

We’re stepping up our strategy and getting more aggressive, so we’re going to add tkg.com links to sites that we know are crawled often (DMOZ, Craigslist, eBay, etc)

• DMOZ is out of the question - we’ve tried updating our listing twice over the last 9 months with no reaction/response/update
• Craigslist - they have ‘nofollow’ links, but we don’t care about passing popularity at this point, just getting Google to the site; we posted some of our SEO job postings
• eBay - I wasn’t a fan of this idea at first because this doesn’t really apply to our industry (ie: we’re not ecommerce); I had a chat with our SEO team and we decided to go for it! So you can now purchase your very own TKG polo shirt on eBay

It’s been 6 days since the site migration and MSN is the 2nd Search Engine to being indexing the new www.tkg.com pages (Yahoo! indexed within 48 hours; still waiting on Google).

Not only is MSN indexing the new domain, it’s ranking www.tkg.com for the following phrases: canton ohio web design; akron web hosting; canton web hosting

Did you notice that www.cantonerectors.com ranks for ‘canton web hosting’ because of TKG’s footer link that’s on their site? Nice!

We knew it was coming & it’s now its upon us - some of our phrases we benchmarked are completely off the map (in other words, we’re not ranking in the first 5 pages in Google), some have decreased dramatically, some haven’t changed a bit and some have actually increased a little bit.

Below illustrates our current Google ranking versus before the site migration began - the bolded phrases are no longer ranking in Google, no longer driving traffic and no longer converting visitors

I stand corrected…

In my post earlier today, I mentioned that www.tkg.com was not ranking yet - after additional research by our awesome SEO interns, we found that for some of the phrases I mentioned in my Search Engine rankings benchmark post, both the new & old domains are ranking in Yahoo! This gives us more ‘real estate’ in the SERPs (see image below) which is great for us now - but I know this will all end once everything shakes out. Hopefully we can gain additional traffic from Yahoo! while both domains are ranking..I’ve checked and so far, Yahoo! isn’t supplying any more traffic than it used to.