getting de-blacklisted at Google (and others)
Hello, everyone. I've created a fan site for a musical artist. I'll substitute the name “Malia Fiori” for her name, “Malia Fiori and the Anomalies” for her band, and maliafiorifans.net for the web site. Gonna do so because I'd rather not put on the web the fact that my site is blacklisted.
Yes, I've inadvertently gotten it blacklisted in Google, Altavista, and probably some other search engines. I think we're probably being penalized for too many occurrences of the phrase “Malia Fiori” or Malia Fiori and the Anomalies.” There has been no deliberate spoofing. I haven't hidden her name repeated over and over in invisible text. Every occurrence of her name I've believed was legitimate.
Issue 1: photos.html
One of the key features of the site is photo albums of the artist taken by various photographers including myself. The photo albums page is a file named photos.html. On it is a collection of tables, each of which contains a thumbnail image of a performance and a name of the performance, for example, “Malia Fiori and the Anomalies at The The Rendezvous Bar, Saint Joseph, Missouri” or “Malia Fiori at The Hub, Cedar Falls, Iowa, solo acoustic.” Since there are 20 such photo albums listed, we've got the phrase, “Malia Fiori” 20 times. But wait, each thumbnail has an alt = command that includes her name. That doubles the count to 40.
Issue 2: Thumbnail pages
Here's where we really get a ton of duplicate phrases. When you click on a thumbnail on the photos.html page, you're brought to a page of thumbnails that each represent a photo in the album. The user can click on whatever photo he wants to see, which pulls up a separate html page with the full-size photo on it. Each photo on the thumbnail page has an alt = tag that includes Malia's name and sometimes also the venue. There's also a logo at the top of the page of “maliafiorifans.net” with the alt tag “Malia Fiori Fans.” Therefore, if the photo shoot yielded 40 photos, her name is on the page 41 times. Some photo shoots are as small as 4 images; others are as large as 100. That's a lot of occurrences of her name.
Issue 3: Full-sized photo pages
Each page with the full-size photo contains the alt = and then her name command. In other words, the photo shoot that had 100 photos has 100 separate html pages, each with an alt = tag that includes Malia's name.
I was not deliberately spoofing. When learning to create pages, I learned that it was better for the user to always include a descriptive alt = tag for people who have images shut off or who are browsing with a blind person's audio browser. In fact, I didn't have to create any of these pages in a traditional html editor like Dreamweaver. I'm a computer programmer and designed my own tool that would automatically generate all my html pages. Once I'm done with a photo shoot and get all the images edited and optimized for the web, I plug in the name of the venue, the date, and the name of the photographer, and – boom – all my pages are created. This has saved me a ton of time. A shoot with 100 images has one thumbnail page, plus 100 html pages, each one with its own photo and “previous” and “next” images with javascript rollovers. However, it looks like my ingenuity has backfired on me with too many occurrences of Malia's name getting the site blacklisted.
Issue 3: Transparent gifs
I've made use of transparent gifs to assist with formatting. In articles I've used them with small dimensions to indent paragraphs like you see in books. I've also used such gifs to push up my site buttons and hold them placed where I want them. In these images I've not included any alt = tags.
Obviously I need to reduce the occurrences of Malia's name on my thumbnail pages and corresponding photo pages. Fortunately, I won't have to go back and edit those pages one by one. Instead, I'll be recoding my html generating program. I intend to change it so that I now have the option of only putting Malia's name into the alt tag of the first thumbnail and then doing the rest of them with no alt tag. I'll also have the option of using no alt tags, and I'll leave in the original option
Question #1: Will using only one alt = tab on my thumbnail pages be enough to fix the problem? Or do I also need to reduce Malia's name on each full-sized image page? For example, the shoot that has 100 photos has html pages 1.html, 2.html, 3.html and so on up till 100.html. Each of these pages has an alt = tag. Will this keep me blacklisted? Or do I need to change it so that only 1.html has her name and all the rest don't?
Question #2.
Is there a problem with the way I've used transparent gifs? None of these gifs use any alt = tags, so the name repetition isn't a problem here. However, can transparent images be misinterpreted and thus trigger penalization or blacklisting?
Question #3.
Once I get the site fixed up will Google, Altavista, and others scan it again and remove the blacklisting? Or do I need to do something to make sure they're informed?
Question #4. Right now the (fictitious substitution) name of the site is maliafiorifans.net. However, I own the rights to maliafiorifans.com and originally published it under that URL. Last September the site went down when my subscription to my web host went down. I brought the site back last month under the new dot net URL without the dot com one. Would it help to unblacklist the site if I brought back the dot com one in its place while nixing the dot net one?
Final Comment
I like using the program I've written and intend to keep using it. I don't wish to move to any of the flash or php-based utilities for photo albums. I like using mine because I can keep the pages very simple but good looking without their being tedious to create.
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Re: getting de-blacklisted at Google (and others)
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