Does Google Penalise Pages Or Whole Site?

[austtr]

If Google determines that a site is spamming, do they penalise just the offending page(s) or the whole site?

[PatrickDeese]

The whole site, in most cases.

Exceptions would be free sites like places like tripod/geocities, etc.

[pageoneresults]

Actually I've seen instances of where individual pages within a site were penalized. I've also seen those same sites slowly lose PR on the unaffected pages over a period of time.

[SEO practioner]

PageOnRes, I've pretty much seen the same too

[jcoronella]

Someone who may not be GoogleGuy actually commented on a question like this at the PubCon... I forget his response... anyone remember exactly what he said?

[austtr]

The reason I'm asking is that a major site in one of my pet areas seems to have vanished.... except for a few pages. I'm pretty certain there is a penalty involved and if this one site is typical, then it does seem as if it's the pages that are being penalised.

[austtr]

duplicate post removed.

[Tony_Perry]

I have tested this by producing duplicate pages and waiting to see what happens! One of the duplictae pages will be downgraded with little or no affect to the rest of the site.

[austtr]

Tony_Perry

Not the same thing. I'm talking about a site with pages containing lots of hidden stuffing. The question was whether just naughty pages are penalised or the whole domain.

Since the original post I've done a search for the whole domain name, as in "www.domainname.com". Google responds with a "not found in index" message so I'm interpreting that as a penalty on the domain.

If that's the case, the question becomes "then why are some lower level pages still showing?" I'm guessing here but:

1) perhaps Google has only only "processed" some of the site and the remaining pages will vanish in later updates.

2) maybe the remaining pages are not considered naughty and get to stay in the index.

Time will tell I guess.