daveblake - 11:31 am on Oct 19, 2006 (gmt 0)

My PR5 site was demoted by Google on April 26 to the 31 spot across hundreds of key phrases and the unique domain itself (xyz of xyz.com). All were formerly at No 1 or No 2 spot. I have documented the terms, and I also keep a weekly spreadsheet on Google site rankings and site counts.

We are >30 for every single phrase not just some phrases.

We have a Google webmaster account, and regularly submit in a new sitemap. We have copntacted Google via this account plus about a dozen other ways. All Google ever did was submit an automated response telling me to read the webmaster guidelines.

We have spent hundreds of man hours on this 4 year old site, which has several thousand pages of unique content, on a step-by-step basis trying to eliminate any potential problems . At several points we have updated Google that changes have been made and requested that they re-evaluate (whether manually or automatically - who knows or cares?). These corrections were mostly minor, a little inter-site linking, some 301 redirects that needed to be put in place etc. Some things we just can't help, like several spam sites that have duplicated bits of our content. There is no hope of getting these sites to remove it.

The rub is we have invested years of effort to build up a useful site that brought in some good business. It gets dumped by G, OK obviously you don't get told about this, and it matters not that we were a Tier 1 Adwords customer. But we rigorously try to detect the reason for this penalty, and having failed we waste more money contracting a top SEO firm to see whether they can pick up on something we missed. Still no luck.

Where is the communication from Google? It is the complete lack of any support or help that irks me. We have given up any hope of getting this site back up - and from all I have read on forums etc about PENALTY 31, none of the victims have recovered, even those who have completely rebuilt their site have not been restored. Which makes me wonder whether it would take manual intervention to remove a PENALTY 31.