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wow reading your post, my heart started racing. Congrats on the escape.. however welcome back to the club :(

Is there anything in specific that you may think got you out of it for that short period of time? (how long was it by the way?)

Did you submit any re-inclusions requests recently?

Do I believe what my staff tell me?

Usually, yes. We use an inhouse developed project management system, which all staff and management are required to use so i am at any one time able see what people are working on, and check it. Content and programming is checked by the SEO team, for possible problems with duplicate content, links to bad sites, bad html etc,

We run a crawler on our sites weekly, and map historical pr of pages we link out to, and suspend links to page that drop more than 3 places in pr, or nofollow them. This includes links from within our content, not just from within link applications.

Lots of checks and balances in place, we are running many sites, off one system and a central data store, without lots of controls it just would not work.

In a Google groups thread yesterday, a poster stated that his website had gotten out of the -30 serp penalty after fixing all the problems and filing a reinclusion request. He said that he had gotten out of the penalty literally within a few days after filing the reinclusion request.

Adam Lasnik posted to this thread which gives it credence. So it does appear that there is hope after all. This is the best news I have received in literally a year.

To recap here, this is what this guy did:

Put a 301 redirect from a mostly duplicate .co.uk site to the .com site (July)

Fixed the index.html and index.htm thing (September)

Removed the printer-friendly pages, which is a shame (September)

Removed the white papers from our partners. They set-up links to the
source (us).

Checked none of the titles on the web site were the same (some had
'standard' titles because a template page had been used).

Continued to add good content.

Submitted reinclusion request (10 days ago)

Penalty lifted (3 days ago)

I find it most disturbing!

NONE of the infractions listed in the above post seem to be of a malicious nature. My own -30 site did not require any 301 redirects and was "guilty" of ~ 90 duplicate page titles (out of nearly 1600 pages) and links back to the home page as index.htm instead of www.mysite.com/. (all long since remedied)

These "sins" hardly seemed to be mortal enough as to elicit a penalty so harsh that it require a human to intervene to remove it.

Is there something I'm missing here?

I'm the guy who posted on groups, I missed you were quoting what I'd written.

This forum was invaluable to me when I was trying to sort this out.

Pete.

I was able to determine that they had started doing this way back in April. Just prior to my site's falling into this "plague". Coincidense? Maybe - Maybe not...

I emailed the webmaster and ordered them to cease and desist immediately. He complied and said to "let him know if I found anymore pages of mine on his site". I replied with - "You search your database for ALL referrence to my site and REMOVE it ALL. If I find one more incidence of your site in my referere logs, the next notifying I will be doing is to report you to the search engines for content theft!

Perhaps it was THAT incident that elicited my "penalty" from Google? Perhaps now that he has removed my site from his (He was doing the same to countless other sites) mine will resurface?

Not to incite any conspiracy theories or nuthin...

BUT I also happen to be a Yahoo partner!

Deleted keyword sitewide links
301'd the entire site
Wiped out all outbound links
Made all urls complete
Deleted old pages (Some of which were designed for infoseek and the like)

I detected robots in a directory containing an entire copy of the site (Used to track PPC) and I placed a NOINDEX tag on all the pages in that directory.

Yesterday I requested a reinclusion with everything above listed and also included an explaination regarding the use of "text-link-ads" and when I dumped them.

That's all I could think of in the what "might be wrong dept". The site has been dead since April. Right now we are ranking in the 30-70 range for almost everything except some keywords with searches "keyword" or thiskeywordhasnospacesbetweenthewords. There we rank in the top pages.

Like James45 I pretty much deleted the entire site. It directories with doorway pages, links to bad neighborhoods etc.

I added a few image galleries and submitted a reinclusion request.

The site never came back. It's a shame because it's a killer domain and a site that I've had almost 10 years.

I imagine the penalty was not lifted because someone looked at it and decided there wasn't anything special or unique about the "new" site.

It's a catch 22. I'm not going to pour a lot of effort into a site until the ban gets lifted. Google won't lift the ban until the site is worthy.

But one thing is for sure.. if you were -31 and now are 1.. wow!

After half a day since re-inclusion.. sitting at a healthy #48 :) Let's see if anything happens after a week or so. Sadly at this point.. after 6-7 months.. there is nothing left to "fix".

The site I think has a -30 is at #28

When this happened a few days back, I removed 2 site wide links that were pointing to the site. For reference, I also purchased some Adwords advertising to supplement some of the traffic during the potential down-time.

nuthin, to be more specific, what exactly will you be taking precaution with? What in your eyes was the reason for your site being penalized then returning? Did you submit a re-inclusion request recently?

Thanks for any much needed advice!