The Chilling Effects of a Google Ban

Hello folks,

Today we have a guest blogger who will be sharing with you a horror story about ending up in the Google “Chilling” area, which is similar to what we used to call the “sandbox.”

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In July 2008 I was hired as the IT manager / Webmaster for a Debt Settlement company.

Six months prior my employer had a site designed/developed by an independent web developer. The purpose for this temporary website was to establish a web presence prior to opening the brick & mortar operations center.

The requirements communicated to the contract developer were to develop a website similar in content and layout to a local competitor in the debt settlement industry. By no means did management communicate that the developer should scrape the layout and content verbatim from a competitor’s website. The final product was a unique web design but much of the content was verbatim our competitor’s website.

Within 90 days from going live the respective competitor tried reaching us via email with an informal cease and desist order claiming copyright infringement. The request was ignored because counsel advised management that as long as the design was unique there wasn’t much that could be done if the content on the website did not have an official copyright protecting their content.

This is not 100% true and should not be ignored.

If an individual or company feels that their website has been plagiarized in any way that affects their image or business operations, aside from filing a lawsuit, they can report this offense to Google.

Once Google has been notified and they review the complaint for validity, the plaintiff will be referred to a third-party organization by the name of Chilling Effects Clearing House (www.chillingeffects.org) where a formal complaint is entered into their database.

If a website reaches the Chilling Effects database, rectifying the complaint will require a substantial amount of resources and diligent effort.

Google and Chilling Effects collaborate together. A flagged website in the Chilling Effects database with a complaint pending will most likely have a Google ban filter in effect. This means the site will not appear anywhere in the Google index.

It has been nine months and our complaint is still listed as “pending”.

If it wasn’t for my Google Webmaster account our search engine ban may have never been discovered. Upon the inception of my employment I immediately setup an account with Google Analytics / Webmaster Tools. Within a couple of days of setting up my account a backlog of email filtered in from Google that indicated we were banned from the index and it included a link to the Chilling Effects complaint that was filed by our competitor.

As previously mentioned, the website that caused these problems was developed as a temporary solution until business operations began. In July 2008 we implemented a new design and began integrating silos containing unique content.

These updates were implemented before I knew there was a copyright complaint pending. Unfortunately it was too late.

We hired an Intellectual Property attorney to appeal to Google and formally submit a re-inclusion request. Google removed the ban but only for our company name. We have approximately 100 pages of content organized into silos and in excess of 150 inbound links. No organic rankings anywhere for even the most obscure long tail keywords. As a webmaster this is extremely frustrating because there is nothing I can do to improve our Search Engine saturation and there is no way for me to definitively gauge when we may appear in the rankings.

I have resolved that the only logical solution to is buy a new domain, switching my IP address, and rebuild my company website.

Sincerely, Guest Writer