Destroyed by Google, need help!

So you built a site and lots of people just appeared out of nowhere, and then disappeared again without a trace?
It could be the case that you where publishing mugshots of kidnappers and they abducted your audience. Some of the bank robbers maybe are holding them up somewhere for ransom, so maybe charge your cell phone and wait for the call.
Or give us more detail as to what you did to get those visitors in the first place.
Or just call the Milk carton company and tell them you have a mass missing persons request.

Duplicate content, isn't that obvious? There are tons of sites with this data already so you need to add other value to those pages. Mashing in related social media and getting users to interact with the pages will also help a bit.

IF you have a lousy link profile with no authority you don't stand much of a chance either.

Would displaying related articles on the pages and have active social widgets allow for a change in status? Or is that not enough?

You're bound to get a lot of hate doing that. A friend of mines had a dui case dismissed but the site refused to remove his info. Ranked #1 for his name too. Nothing a bit of reputation management and negative SEO couldn't solve though. I feel like a god sometimes. Good luck profiting on other people's misfortunes.

I have a feature set up for removal requests with a $9.99 admin fee. We won't remove sex offenders or violent criminals unless we are provided proof of exoneration. That's not the purpose of the site though, it's strictly to bring in Adsense revenue - which it was, in a huge way.

I have worked out a solution though! Simply put, we are going to pull feed data from news sources in the local jurisdictions for the arrests (all arrests are public in the paper), so that should added enough content (related content) to keep off that omitted results filter.

Google Launches Fix To Stop Mugshot Sites From Ranking: Google's MugShot Algorithm

It's the same content found on hundreds of other sites/pages that you don't own. Your buried in Supplemental SERPs (duplicate content).

Google tries to filter out duplicate pages, it doesn't always work but as you can see it works for the most part.

I imagine you scraped page titles from another site, If so, that's the first thing I would change. Next, you need better SEO than the other hundred sites (or however many) that have the same content.

You could also add additional content to each page that the other public data sites don't have to help differentiate your pages from the rest of the pack (competition), that's up to you to figure out what that extra content would be.

Glad people like you had their websites crushed by GOogle.

Making money off of other people's criminal record is asking for it, just be thankful that Google shut you down before someone else did.

Instead of benefiting off of others misfortune or bad decision making why dont you go produce something of value. If you even can, lol.

We are all here because we are internet marketers. Honestly, this one site (out of the 1,100 that I own) is the only one that has experienced a growth rate like this. It went from $0/day to $200/day in a matter of 13 days. The traffic is coming back now, after making some minor tweaks and inserting some extras into the pages.

The point is... This isn't capitalizing on misfortune and bad luck. If someone got arrested, they weren't unlucky - this did something illegal. Whether or not they were proven guilty, incarcerated, etc - that's up to the courts. I simply take the person's name and picture, and put it on a website. My employee who runs the site is only paid when removals are paid for, hence the admin fee. Otherwise, that employee won't make money.

So, if you want to call it extortion, fine - call it that. But that couldn't be further from what it is. It just so happens that my employee is someone who needed a 2nd chance. Hopefully she isn't the only one I will be able to hire to work on this project.

You own 1k other sites, you seriously don't need this form of money making

Yes thanks for an interesting topic (about the first here all week).

And yes the site sounds pretty nasty.

Reputation means a lot to people. Here in Thailand if you go in a police station your mugshot appears all over the web even if you're a victim of a crime (e.g. ladyboys steal all your possessions).

I don't know how anyone who runs this kind of site can sleep at night...

Haha, accurate and to the point!