We have a site that is penalized in the organic SERPs (and no it is not getting outranked by other sites doing better SEO - in fact one of my other sites is beating it out and it is pretty crappy).
Other people on WebmasterWorld have confirmed it has some sort of penalty. I have tried to get consultation from some of the smartest SEO's I know, but I have not yet been able to find anyone that has any theories (that hold up) on why we have received this penalty.
The only theory we have NOT been able to disprove is a manual penalty. I can go into more detail as to facts upholding this "manual" penalty theory, but this is not the place for that.
My question is whether or not an Adwords Rep could talk to someone to find out whether a manual penalty exists.
I am not asking for someone to REMOVE the penalty. I don't even need to know WHY a penalty was applied. I just want to know if it is something I can fix on my own (in other words - I tripped a filter and I need to "untrip" it). But if it is a manual penalty, then there is nothing I can do and I need to start over on a new site.
We spend $10,000 a week on Adwords and part of that is for branding. Our site has been around for 5 years and so I would prefer not to start over since we have built a good brand. But on the other hand, I can't continue spending $10,000 if I am not helping my future branding at all. So I wanted to see what kind of support people have received from their Reps. We have been working for 7 weeks on trying to determine the penalty and could end up spending 7 months, but if it is manual, then there is no possibility of resolving this on our own.
I am not one that will complain about losing a ranking, and I do not think google owes my anything regardless of Adwords spending (if I am not ranking, then that is my fault). I just want to know that I am on the same playing field as my competitors.
The exact same thing happened to us earlier this year, and I'm afraid you're right: the answer is "no". Actually, you can complain to Google and they might send polite e-mail replies. If you're spending enough to have an AdWords account rep, he or she might listen sympathetically, and say your concerns will be passed through to the tech people, but I don't think it'll really do much good.
I agree, it is very frustrating when you're being punished and don't know why. I was in the exact same situation as you. Could not figure out what was wrong. We were number 1 on our main keyword for 2 1/2 years, and then bang: gone from the index altogether.
We eventually made a bunch of trivial changes, which according to Webmasterworld wisdom should have made no difference, and got back in. Still don't know what the problem was.
But yeah, we were spending twice as much as you, but it didn't help when it came to figuring out why were were being punished.
