snowweb - 4:39 am on May 9, 2006 (gmt 0)

Hmm.. I don't see this as just 'backlink' problem. If you have a low PR, your pages should still show in the index under a site:domain.com search. If they don't, I see that as a bug.

To Googleguy, I would like to say that it is great to at last have some feedback but it does sound as though you are barking up the wrong tree and still don't really recognise the scale of the problems being experienced. You appear to be of the opinion that those whose sites have all but dissappeared from the index were deserving of such treatment because you can see that they have a penalty.

First of all, did you check to see whether the penalty really was deserved or whether it was awarded in error? Did you actually see the offence yourself? How do you know that penalties are not being awarded erroneously?

I know for sure that I had no duplicate content, no spam techniques, just a simple website selling web hosting and web design. It has about 40 pages (only homepage displayed now though in site:). All page titles and descriptions are different, I even have a sitemap and can see that Googlebot has has visited them in the past.

Secondly, why can you see whether we have a penalty and we can't? Is there really any harm in putting a red dot on our sitemaps account summary page with the text "Duplicate content penalty" with a link to what this mean and even specifically what content?

Surely that would beat all the emails Google must receive daily asking why there site has been dropped.

Also, there should be a simple link to press if you believe the penalty was awarded in error. A human should then review the pages and correct the penalty if it was an error.

Honestly, I'm exhausted by Google. I don't have trouble with Yahoo or MSN, my pages are always reliably there. Why is Google such hard work? I want to spend my time writing content for my users, and designing web sites for clients not working as a Google slave.

I never considered writing any special code for the search engines until now. There was simply no need, but I'm forced now, for the first time, to do that. Since I now have nothing to lose (except the homepage), I have written a separate template which php will use for the Googlebot when he comes. It's nothing fancy, it simply removes the fancy navigation, images etc which has the effect of putting the content nearer the top of the page. That way if it's a problem with duplicate content because it's only checking the first 200 lines of my template and never sees the real content, it should then avoid awarding it a duplicate content penalty.

It also will hopefully increase my keyword density (or at least help to make Googles calculation of this, accurate).

GG, please don't think I'm getting at you. It's great that someone at Google is taking our concerns seriously. I hope you're able to kick some butt there and get things sorted out for us real soon!

Regards

peter