Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
First thing I want to clarify is what this pheomenon looks like: your domain used to rank well for a number of searches, and now all those searchs show you at position #31, top of page 4. The very best test to discover if you are infected is this: do a search on your domain name itself - type example.com into the Google search box, a search where you naturally expect to be #1. If you have this particular penalty against you, then even that search will show you at position #31.
No other types of suspected penalties are relevant to this thread. If you are not showing #31 for a search on your domain name, then this discussion does not apply to your site.
This position #31 penalty is not at all widespread. I brought up the topic all over at Las Vegas PubCon this past week -- and I barely found anyone, even in this seriously hooked-up crowd, who had a clue what I was talking about. And for the few who did, it was because they read this thread, not because they're bumping into it on their sites or with their clients.
Adam commented a bit on google groups but said he would not comment more because of google secrets.
This seems to be the official comment from Google: no comment. Even with 25 Google employees in attendance at PubCon, no further comments could be heard. As I said, the crowd here had no attention for the topic either.
Although some who suffer this experience appear to be mystified, I sense that the majority have quite a good sense of what's happening - what past marketing approaches may have brought down wrath from Mountain View. It clearly IS associated with practices that were aimed directly at manipulating the Google SERPs, rather than honest marketing practices. Maybe the site owner doesn't know what someone else in the company did in their name, and maybe they're just dissembling.
It seems to me the position #31 penalty is a warning shot -- and a very unusual one at that, quite loud and low across the bow. I believe it will not be a long term feature of the way Google functions. I do not have any sense that new sites will be contracting Google Flu #31 in an ongoing fashion. One morning, not too far from now, we will wake up and not see this.
Until that morning, I think patience and good hygiene in online marketing are the way to go. Scour the Google Webmaster Guidelines, and demand full disclosure from all staff and third parties involved in online marketing/SEO.
[edited by: tedster at 3:49 pm (utc) on April 5, 2007]
I'm a director of a web development company, there are 10 of us, plus 2 offshore teams.
We have a weekly management meeting, where everyone reports on what they are doing, why they are doing it. Its just good business.
Nothing of mission critical importance, it left entirely in the hands of one person with no checks and balances.
In my inital post, I was trying to ascertain how bad links had made their way onto your site, and to know for the good of the collective. Was a forum was being abused? A form or blog exploited? All holes in link security that people reading this would benefit from knowing.
I suppose its just as beneficial for all to learn that it was simply lax(no?) quality control of content.
Not sure how Google's rules have suddenly changed, that bad content or links is now a problem, as if it wasn't alreaedy, but there you go.
Assuming that they have a lot of people evaluating competitive serps (i and others believe they do), ...
As mentioned in my previous post, I have been having trouble finding anything that is unique about our penalized site versus our other sites. In other words, why this site and not all of them if they have the same technical structure and linking structure? Now I have thought of one more unique thing about the penalized site. While it is in the same PR range as our other sites, the search engine traffic is unique and that could be triggering some sort of threshold aspect to the penalty. The penalized site had a #1 placement for an extremely competitive keyword, producing about 65,000 total search engine referrals a month (80% of which were probably from Google), which is far more referrals than any other keyword for all our sites. Given this difference, I suspect there is a factor at play that only high profile, competitive SERP cases would get the penalty. Which may or may not be related to a group of individual reviewers focusing on competitive SERPs. It could easily be in the algo.
If all our sites were as successful, they might also have the penalty. So the issue would become not to focus on what is unique about this one site, but to fix the unknown problem that might be affecting all sites. Depending on what I come up with to fix, this could mean a massive reworking of our system so I wonder what others think of this theory.
Does this seem to resonate with others' experiences?
Incidentally, we have done nothing sneaky with linking to warrant the #1 for that competitive term. It's an old site with good quality, original content that naturally gets a lot of inbound links from .edu sites and other reliable sites.
Thanks!
"We have a weekly management meeting, where everyone reports on what they are doing, why they are doing it. Its just good business."
After which a very sleepy (it is hibernation season at theBear's lattitude) woodland critter asks (whilst perusing his magnificent bridge and thinking of a possible sale).
Do you believe everything you are told?
< continued here: [webmasterworld.com...] >
[edited by: tedster at 1:36 pm (utc) on Oct. 31, 2007]
