Forum Moderators: open
So, how did Google penalize your site and what were you doing?
Google themselves are not immune from the automatic penalties.
A similar effect is seen now at DMoz.org and the Google Directory in Web promotion related categories.
Two sites linked to that secondary domain. Google indexed both the primary and secondary therefore causing duplicate content.
We fixed the redirect on the secondary domain so that it is now a 301 Permanent Redirect. This all happened back in November/December 2001.
Unfortunately, the site still has PR disease. PR2 for the home page, PR1 and PR0 for internal pages. I devoted my heart and soul to that site and it was ranked in the #3 to #5 position for search engine optimization back then.
I gave up after months of failed communications with Google and rewriting the html page by page to make sure that I was not missing anything.
All in all, it was a learning experience. I learned about redirects, I learned about validating code and I learned about CSS. At the same time, I learned Google can make or break you in the long run. Thankfully that site was used solely as an information resource when speaking with client referrals.
If I can't get Google to lift the penalty, then the site comes down before the end of the year. I've been through all 100+ pages and cannot find a single issue that would cause this type of ban, not one. I don't even want to go there! It pissed me off to no end, but, there really isn't much you can do other than move on to life's next venture whatever that may be.
P.S. I would strongly suggest that you be very careful in setting up redirected domains. First thing to do is run a Header Check and make sure the domain is returning the proper response code. My understanding is the only true way to set up a redirect is through a 301 Permanent Redirect.
P.S.S. I may not be able to get the penalty lifted since I did Disallow: Googlebot about 45 days ago. Based on what I am seeing, Googlebot has not reindexed the site so the Disallow: has not gone into effect yet. When the penalty is in place, unusual things happen. ;)
Mistakes:
#1 -I used WPG to check my ranking - last time was June 2001 and before that, Nov 2000.
#2 -I was in two link farms - Buddy Links and LinkTopics - removed both waaaay back in March 2001.
#3 - I did use my domain shopping cart to allow purchasing from an old personal site which at the time was not indexed by google. Google found the old site, evidently from someone linking to it. It wasn't a mirror site, but did have very similar content.
Except for the shopping cart, what I was doing wrong was ended before the penalties were applied.
What I did to correct the problems:
#1 - Besides stopping all of the above, I checked my domain for orphaned pages, duplicated/similar pages and removed them all.
#2 - validated my code.
#3 - removed any 'iffy' links to sites that might be considered "bad neighborhoods".
#4 - Emailed google (many times).
#5 - posted in this forum (googleguy once told me my site (domain) had no penalty but it had been PR0 and was then showing as PR2 (still is). Site was PR5/6 prior to penalty.
The penalty was first applied last Jun/Jul 2001. Site came back from PR0 to PR2 on home page with all internal still PR0 sometime during my move and shortly after googleguy admitted they might have applied filters to strongly, probably Oct or Nov 2001.
Being dropped from google can totally wipe out a website that you have worked hard for years to develop, be very careful of what you do!
There evidently is no automatic reinstatement - ever. But, if you are fortunate to ask a question at the right time when googleguy happens to stop by, he may lift the penalty (happened to a friend of mine this past update).
With all google's resources it seems that some type of program could be instituted to automatically handle inquiries, checking out current history to see if/when the noxious behaviour ceased. Perhaps, a form with check boxes. Then a program could check the validity of the inquiry without stressing google's human resources.
[edit] Just a note as there have been varying reports about googlebot crawling penalized sites.
My domain has been crawled continually throughout this long period. Usually, within a day or two after a change on my home page, google would show the fresh date in the serps and hold the updated page in the cache.
[edited by: nancyb at 7:58 pm (utc) on July 30, 2002]
PR3, PR2, PR1 with internal pages hovering between PR0 and PR1 are all the same penalty. If you cannot climb above the PR3 level, the disease is rooted deep. I call it a disease because it can be fatal to some. Thankfully I was not relying on the Internet to generate my own personal income. If so, I probably would have driven over to Googleplex and found a way to solve the problem. I got hit in December 2001. Been hovering between PR0 and PR2 since then. Its ugly, I hate to even have the site there. But, with an average of 100+ visitors per day still, I don't want to take it offline just yet.
Googlebot, I've Disallowed you from indexing my site about 45 days ago. Please come and read the robots.txt file and give me a gray toolbar so I can get the damn penalty lifted, please?
That won't work :)
Gee thanks NFFC! That's okay, I've given up on that part of my life and have moved on to better things. Come December 2002, if not sooner, the site comes down page by page.
P.S. I kind of figured that anyway. Once you are penalized, Google does not crawl the site anymore or at least that was my experience with this particular site. If it doesn't crawl, it doesn't read.
To get back in, we pulled lots of links to PR0 sites and fixed up all the meta tags. I think it was the meta tags as we had used default ones (with our keywords) on a lot of pages just out of laziness.
It may be of some value to look at what we *didn't* do.
We didn't change the site's internal linking. We have navigation on the top of the page, the side and the bottom (and sometimes liberally on the page itself!). Many of the posts here talk about "too much crosslinking" but I would suggest that there is a thin line between one person's "comprehensive navigation structure" and another's "too much cross-linking".
We had quite a high keyword density. We didn't change this either as it is was natural rather than forced.
We often have different versions of pages lying around the site. We didn't tidy these up either. Logic being, only one version was ever linked to from the site so Google shouldn't be able to see the different versions of them. Treating Google just like a human visitor is not a bad way to think about it in my opinion.
We didn't worry about stuff we couldn't influence. This includes links *from* PR0 sites, competitors using WebPositionGold (or whatever) to freak Google out, competitors submitting us to link farms etc. I have read elsewhere that a Google employee said "nothing anyone else can do will affect your PR". In other words, don't sweat the things you can't fix/influence. If Google is to be truly scalable then this is logically the only way they can operate it. This is worth noting as you see a lot of people on this board crying about stuff their competitiors might be doing to influence their websites. Don't worry about it (you'll only send yourself mad if you do) and I believe what Google says about the matter.
We didn't email Google much at all. In fact we only sent one whining email a month or so after the penalty was applied. We got an automated reply. I don't believe emailing them has much effect at all. I disagree with the idea that Google uses manual (human) interventions to apply/remove penalties. It's simply not scalable to do it that way.
Hope some of this helps. We rely on the website to put food on the table so the penalty wasn't much fun at all however you have to agree that it's a doozy of a way to get people to tidy up their websites!
Tip o' the hat to this board as well which is about the best resource I've found for search engine discussion.
panicbutton, it could have been a combination of factors that caused the penalty, not just one. But I wouldn't count on Google not finding what's not easily found by human visitors. Just about anything on the web can be found and tracked.
Then the client redesigned the site so it doesn't show up anywhere anyway. :) A site with a PR7 that midas well have a PR0. Now they cloak.
8 months later just coming out of the hole, but have 4 sites still affected. Doh! My fault = Cannot blame Google (although I can blame another noticeboard that said this was a good way to get a nice rank....) Still hope and pray they will remove the others from the dustbin.
My advice: Never cross-link (links on the bottom of every index page on every site with good keywords as links) as it WILL get your site stuffed. Avoid linking to Credit card and casino sites. Eat your greens and brush daily.
Possible things done wrong:
1/ Tiny bit of white text on white page (but they're not links, simply titles)
2/ Used to belong to Link2Link way back in 2000 and some of these old pages on other sites are still in Google pointing to me :-(
3/ ... I have no idea at all what I really did wrong :-(
Results in:
1/ 2500 visitors (and rising) per month drops to 800 (and falling)
2/ Depression
1) A technical glitch at their end (Google).
2) The site was unreachable when Google bot visited.
3) The site content changed significantly as did links pointing to the page and the site no longer have page rank or the pages had low page rank to begin with and a small change cud caused it.
I am 100 % sure that point 2) & 3) are non-applicable. I have checked my server up-time report, according to which site was never down during the crawl. Also there was neither any significant change in the content nor in the links pointing to it. They also added that the site might reappear after the next update in few weeks.
Hence, I patiently waited for the latest update to be over, but my site is still nowhere to be seen, but I noticed a new thing last week page cache, backward links and similar page are back, but the site is still at large. This is very strange. I heard of Google penalizing a site by reducing the PR, but this is first of it's kind incidence where a site is penalized by dropping altogether from the index but retaining the cache, back links, similar pages etc.,
Any one else experienced like this before??????..
nutsandbolts - I recently went through half a dozen of my sites inserting text links that point back to my main website, much like many website design companies do - am I safe? I had assumed crosslinking was when you have each site linking to each of the others in a closed group. I make sure my sites also have links pointing out of the group. Am I doomed?
2. How do I test a site to see whether it's in a bad neighborhood? Should I remove any link that points to a site with a whited out pagerank?
3. My contribution to the comprehensive penalty list: I submitted two of my sites to thousands of guestbooks, got thousands of hits for about a year and then dropped like a stone. One of the sites has crept back in but gets all its hits from Yahoo and MSN, the other site died completely and even completely rehosting it under a new address doesn't seem to be helping.
1. Cross linking of sites can be a fairly natural thing on the web. More important than outbound links, IMO, are INBOUND links. If the sites have plenty of inbound links, I think it's less likely that you'll be at risk. Nevertheless, nobody knows exactly how this works, so I'd be cautious.
2. Yes, I'd probably delete links to PR0 sites. A few of these won't hurt you. One think you should definitely avoid are any links to dodgy link farms and the like. IMO, that's a much higher risk factor than a link to a legitimate site that happened to pick up a PR0 penalty. One problem here - due to the "low PR" penalty, you can never be sure you aren't linking to a penalized site (unless, I suppose, you stick with PR6 links and above - not really practical if you are trying to provide a range of useful links to your visitors).
3. Guestbooks have been an identified risk factor. I'm not sure, though, how Google would determine you were doing this vs. your competitor. I'd recommend a look at the PR of the sites and try to analyze what's happening - i.e., whether you are actually penalized or whether your PR simply tanked after Google eliminated the PR contribution of the thousands of guestbook links. PR0 is easy to identify, and the low-PR penalty can, IMO, be guessed at by an external link analysis as well as looking at how PR is transmitted throughout the site.
I wonder if you might take a peek at my site (in my profile) and see if you can see why I have a grey PR0?!?!?!?!? :(
If this condition began with the last update, it's possibly a database error or a problem with the site being down when Googlebot came knocking. If it has been a persistent condition for months, a penalty seems more likely. I didn't poke around and look for anything dodgy.
Some folks here claim to have a litmus test for gray-bar penalties, maybe one of them will give you a thumbs up or down. Good luck!
I have checked my server up-time report, according to which site was never down during the crawl.
That's not really hard evidence. It means that your server was reachable from wherever the service that was checking it was located. But your server being up, or even being reachable from part or most of the net, doesn't mean it's reachable from everywhere or by everyone at any given time. While I don't know, obviously, whether that's what happened with your site it is possible in spite of your uptime report that Googlebot did not reach your site because of some connectivity problem.
The corporate site for the company I work for is banned. No google and no google directory though it is in dmoz. Sorry, check that, it has been nuked from dmoz now too though that just happened in the last couple of weeks.
So how did this happen you may ask and what have I done about it.
What the fools did
1 yr ago, more or less, we got banned
I went hunting for reasons and found some
15-20 domains redirected to the actual site
10 domain aliases to the site
a few mirror sites
every old school underhanded trick you can imagine
pretty much a big mess, should've started a new domain all together because this one is toast.
Emailed google and got a non specific answer that said in 6 mths they would look at it again. I cleaned up everything I could find and figured it wouldn't be enough. So I have spoken to google a few times over the last year but don't expect to ever get back in. Maybe one day the company will finally buy a new domain and start fresh. I just don't really worry about it.
