When you work at a search engine, you hear complaints from site owners when they don’t show up in Google. Even if they say their site is 100% clean, it’s often worth a second look. Recently I saw an email about a family-oriented site (potato salad recipes, snack recipes, Christmas crafts, things like that). Their site wasn’t showing up in Google at all and they wanted to know why. I’ll share my reply with you.

I’m not going to be shy about mentioning concrete details, but for this time I’ll anonymize my reply. Here’s what I said:

Hi, I saw that you wrote to user support asking about
www.XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.com. We recently launched some technology
that looks for duplicate or scraped content. In this case, our
algorithms calculated that there were some strange pages on this domain.

Without know which pages the algorithm detected, I looked around a bit.
I’m guessing

http://www.XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.com/debt-consolidation.html

probably kicked things off. This appears to be a scraped copy of
www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/alerts/bankrupt.htm
In fact, the page on XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.com appears to have not one,
but two copies (one right after the other) of the original page from the
FTC? Also,

http://www.XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.com/free-credit-report.html

appears to be a copy of

http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/credit/freereports.htm

as well.

It also looked like there were some pages such as

http://www.XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.com/legal-forms/item.php?item=75

http://www.XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.com/legal-forms/cat.php?cat=8

that were selling legal forms? It’s good that these pages have been
removed; it didn’t seem like legal agreements such as
“Contract Employing Real Estate Broker for Lease of Property” were
really relevant to XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.com.

Other problems that I noticed included pages such as

http://www.XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.com/credit_repair/more.html

http://www.XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.com/credit_repair/join2.html

These pages appeared to be identical pages copied from XXXXXXXXXXXXX?

Finally, what can you tell me about webmastersXXXXXXXXX.net?
I noticed that the contact info on WHOIS for that domain is
XXXXXXXXX XXXXXX (XXXXXXX@XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.com); is this the same
person that owns XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.com? webmastersXXXXXXXXX seems
to have some things we discourage, such as automated submission of urls
to Google, an affiliate link to get “15,000 links with one click” and
selling software on http://www.webmastersXXXXXXXXX.net/software.html
that includes things like an “Instant Site Maker”, which sounds like it
may be making doorway sites quickly instead of creating useful content.

Anyway, I didn’t have a long time to check out the site you mentioned,
but these were a few things that I noticed. I’d recommend pulling the
pages copied from the FTC and XXXXXXXXXXXXX at a minimum, and taking a
hard look as some of these other issues as well.

Sincerely,
Matt Cutts
Google Software Engineer

A little while later I sent a follow-up email:

Also, someone appeared to be scraping Google to create pages such as

http://www.XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.com/ringtones.html

I can see where someone was putting up pages that just scraped Google
search results for “ringtones”. I can tell Google was being scraped
because the text didn’t copy some characters correctly. I’d
recommend looking into how scraped results from Google ended up at
the root level of this domain. If a particular scraping program was
making these pages, I would recommend not using that software.

Sincerely,
Matt Cutts
Google Software Engineer

You really don’t want to get the sincere email from me. Now is this case beyond repair? No, it’s not. If this site cleans up the scraped/copied/off-topic content, it can still be reincluded.