I understand my website has been removed from the google index since September 22nd. I have tried my best to contact someone at google to find out why to no avail. I have placed postings on the google webmaster blogs and no one can see any reason, or provide me with an explanation as to why my site has been banned.

My site is rentershotline.ca. It has previously been in google for the past 3 years without issue. It is a reputable site with government sites, DMOZ, and hundreds of personal sites, indexes and directories linking to it. I cannot understand any reason why it has been banned. Since its ban, my traffic has dropped from over 3,000 visitors a day to under 300. This is totally destroying me and my business. I offer a completely FREE service to both property owners and renters. I have not made any money off the site – except for about $5.00 in google ads I had on there 4 weeks ago. Strangely enough my site was removed 2 weeks after I placed google ads on the site.

As far as I can see, or anyone else from google groups this has occurred by ERROR. I need to have this issue corrected as soon as possible. Google has not provided me with contact information or direction to correct this issue.

I am not certain what steps I should take next to correct this but I am running out of options.

How can google just arbitrarily destroy the credibility of my site and remove me from their index? This is not just or fair. I am desperate to find a solution. PLEASE PLEASE HELP.

Sincerely,
   Steve
steve295.ca

Here's how to file a reinclusion request:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/reinclusion-request-howto/

By the way, did you ever hire an SEO company or do some SEO stuff yourself?
And what kind of directories are linking to you?
And how many pages were indexed from your site before in Google?

I submitted thru google's re-inclusion page last week, it indicates it could take up to 6 months before my issue will be addressed or even looked at. Waiting that long would be too painful.

I do SEO stuff myself. My site was on the first page for almost every combination of 'city name' rentals, and 'city name' apartments. I worked hard over the last 3 years to achieve those rankings, now totally destroyed.

I'm not sure exactly what directories are linking. yping 'rentershotline.ca' returns 10,300 mentions. Most sites linking in are government and local city / university sites directing property owners and renters to my site. There are also a a number of personal sites and real estate / rental sites linking in as well. Others I do not know.

There was approximately 3,300 pages indexed in google the last time I checked in early September.

Thank's for your suggestion thou. I will keep looking for a quicker solution.

Regards,
Steve

> I do SEO stuff myself.

If you specify what kind of SEO you did we might find some parts where you overoptimized or worse...

Certainly, thank you for your time to help.

I was examining my competition, specifically rent.com and sublet.com.

site:rent.com has 537,000 pages indexed. 80% of these pages are optimized for entry pages into the site based on a specific city name. Each page has little info, with additional city names listed. Mod-rewrite is their choice of method.

site:sublet.com has 325,000 pages indexed. 90% of these pages are optimized for sub-domain entry pages. There are thousands of sub-domains specifically optimized for city names with little additional info. These pages also have a large number of additional city names listed.

On my site, I decided to take the sublet.com route and created a number of sub-domains to assist as entry pages. These pages are a little more powerful as they help the user with displaying other cities and search options only available in the regions they selected.

That is pretty much the only SEO method I've used on my site, other than what you see on my index page with alt tags on images and links.

I'm not sure if that had something to do with it, but I don’t use any different methods than the sites I've listed above, or have gone nearly to their extent of page duplication, so I can’t see why I would be penalized because of that...

I recently looked at yahoo, and noticed they have a number of nonsense pages indexed from my site. I have no idea how they got there. I have my site set up to allow visitors to view property listings by entering www.rentershotline.ca/propertyID#, where the propertyID# is the ID of the listing they wish to see. This also means, if someone tries to search for a file that does not exist on my site it will go to a page that indicates that specific listing could not be found. This page is essentially my 404 error page which I have replaced with a mod-rewrite.

All of the methods I have discussed above have been static on my site for the past several months, and the last time I made a significant change was approximately 6 months ago. About a month ago I placed some google ads on my site. It was a small banner ad on the bottom of my index page, property view page, and search results page. These are dynamic php pages that have different titles and content based on the users search options. These pages had over 8,000 page views a day, and all I can imagine is that the static page name, with different content may have had something to do with my ban. Either way I have removed all google ads from my site. Additionally someone from a google blog pointed out I was missing a DOCTYPE on all my pages, and had a non-SGML character, which I have since corrected as well.

Any additional suggestions would be much appreciated as well.

Steve

Hi Phillip,

   Have you had a chance to take a look at anything on my site that may have caused its removal from the google index?

Thanks,
   Steve

Dunno what's happening, I don't know your site that well... removing anything you might feel you didn't do for your human users might be a good start. And then you gotta wait some months...