Subdirectory Penalty

Results 1 - 1 of about 62,100

[doc_z]

It seems that I have a subdirectory which is affected by a penalty while the rest of the site is unaffected.

The symptoms are:

- pages in the subdirectory have PR0
- searching for site:www.example.com 'some phrase' with a phrase which appears on all pages of the subdirectory but just once on the others yields 'Results 1 - 1 of about 62,100 ...', i.e. just the one result outside the directory is shown
- 'allinanchor: example subdirectory' yields no results

The rest of the pages on this site are ranked as normal. The pages in the subdirectory had good positions before they were removed from the SERPs. The pages in the subdirectory were doorway pages (no other violation of Google's guidelines) while the rest of the pages are 'normal' (not optimized) pages. In the meantime the pages with the penalty were changed, but they are still banned.

Has someone else seen a similar behaviour? If so, are there chances that the penalty will be lifted? Is this due to automatic detection or hand-made?

I haven't studied it in detail and I'm not sure if it has any importance, but the pages in the subdirectory seem to be crawled by 'Googlebot/Test'.

[metablue]

I'm seeing something similar after the last PR update on a site that hasn't changed much for months. The index page is PR6, and the rest were PR5. The links pages are in their own subdirectory, and after the PR update they've all dropped from PR5 to PR2, a pretty substantial drop.

Since nothing has changed on the site, I think this has to be a penalty of some kind, but since my other sites were not affected, I don't see how it could be a general links directory penalty. But if not that, then why suddenly penalize this particular subdir?

[MikeBeverley]

So doc_z, are you saying that if a search returns:

'Results 1 - 14 of about 900 from example.com for widgets ...

... In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 14 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.'

Then that means that your site has received a penalty?

[doc_z]

... dropped from PR5 to PR2 ...

Although this is a significant drop, I doubt that this is a penalty.

Then that means that your site has received a penalty?

No, what you described is normal. What I get is 'Results 1 - 1 of about 66,500' without (!) the well-known phrase 'In order to show you the most relevant ...'. Even if I add '&filter=0' in the URL the results don't change, i.e. just one is shown.

[doc_z]

This penalty seems to be very rare if I'm the only one who is affected.

... if I discovered a new phenomenon I guess I could give it a name ...