Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I was at a minus 30 for about 5 months and in the last couple of days my site has returned to position #6
Would you say that means that the penalty is removed?
[edited by: tedster at 11:34 pm (utc) on April 30, 2007]
In all honesty.. even if it was poor so be it. Atleast once I am free of the penalty I will have a chance to climb the ranks due to content/linking etc and not be doomed to never be lower than page 3,4,5,6,7 as it is now.
I've heard two sides to this story of after-effects of post-penalty scenerios.. some have rebounded fully to pre-penalty levels, while others fell into the 2 page results which wasn't enought to revive the pre-penalty traffic/sales.
[edited by: AustrianOak at 11:42 pm (utc) on May 28, 2007]
Might as well just close my site and try and get back my job.
I had the same problem few months ago, I believe was an anchor text over optimization. From #1 to exactly #31, still haven’t recovered, but slowly going back… I have never bought a single link, but I been focusing too much on a very competitive key search on my IB link’s anchor text. And this is, of course, an un-natural behaviour for google… now I know.
Now, I was on the first page of Google for <a very competitive single word>, I got it in a pretty quick time, no idea why it was so quick but Google seemed to love my site, I did no blackhat stuff, maybe that could be the prob, I got it too quickly? But as I say I didnt break any rules either.
[edited by: tedster at 4:18 am (utc) on May 29, 2007]
The story:
6 Apr - penalty was set.
10-26 - clearing site and then 28May asked for reinclusion with the explanation:
- removed all of artificial links to pages, that are close, but not relevant to query
- 20% automatic redirects to spam pages after not clicked for 3-9 secs(random)
- artificial hidden text
Then I also removed 60% of pages (40k), that was nothing but spam pages. Also removed backlinks from my artificial sites.
6 Jun - penalty was off.
Not returned to same positions, but traffic is at least 3 times bigger. Because of google changed I lost many links on LV and other link exchange systems, so I not returned because I got less links pointing to my site.
In my opinion if anybody reads reinclusion requests, then he can only press one button: "check the site" but why read this - button can be clicked automatically after receiving request, also why this could exist - site was indexed regulary and changes have been evaluated all the time. May be it gives some impression, that we can talk to someone - if you do not write anything, then simply site stays on penalty, but you can confess your sins and big google checks your site.
All the spam techniques are known to google, so if they know how to detect them, they also know when they are gone.
The problem can be when program is wrong and bans you for nothing - but then (I can read from many posts) NOTHING happens - nobody checks yous site and says "ohh, we must immediately remove ban from this site - it is so nice site!".
Did a reinclusion same as the guy above. Just be honest and admit you are a spamming dog. Even if you are not. It will work if your site is of some value.
The only thing that bothers me now is I haveto do some real link building.
Did a reinclusion same as the guy above. Just be honest and admit you are a spamming dog. Even if you are not. It will work if your site is of some value.
The only thing that bothers me now is I haveto do some real link building.
Yep, honesty is the only way to approach it, atleast I've tried that from day one. Just need to find what the cause continues to be.. there is not way after so long that I'd be holding back - I HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE.
I hope (will) join you guys one day!
Oak
Weird thing also happened lately. For several years we have appeared on Google News daily which gives a bit of traffic. However up to a month ago no news stories (or any other pages of course) have appeared above position 31 on the main Google index (since the penalty). Now we get the previous day's stories on the first page when searching on mydomain.com. One day later they are gone though. So this is another tweak on the penalty which is still effectively in force on my site.
We have multiple content websites (ad revenue model) with only one site with a penalty (Site A) despite many similarities in structure between the various sites.
We launched a new website (Site B), last June. It turns out that one of the writers repeated some of the phrasing found on our now-penalized Site A, without noting the source. This happened with 2 articles. They are not complete duplicates but I just ran a "similar page checker" analysis (a free online SEO tool) and they ranked between 44% - 59% similar. You're probably thinking, of course it's related, but...
We know there are people who scrape content from our non-penalized sites and we've been unsuccessful at stopping it, so why wouldn't that cause a penalty since that seems even worse? Does this new situation sound feasible as a cause? And, wouldn't it be Site B to get a penalty, not the primary source?
Also, if you're willing to consider one more thing, this is the key question...
We would like to take the newer article found on Site B (that is similar to the original on Site A) to replace the old article on Site A. We would then notate Site A as the original source on both copies, thereby clarifying which is the true original. (We prefer not to have both copies out there for other reasons.) I know people worry about duplication but this type of duplication (with notated source) would be in keeping with the content licensing model we have used successfully in the past, without any penalty (and with Matt Cutts' direct acknowledgement that our model should be fine).
So my question is whether this particular change will look like Site A is copying from Site B, even though it is in fact an attempt to acknowledge the real source as Site A. Sorry this is so confusing.
Thanks everyone!
Val
[edited by: tedster at 9:17 pm (utc) on June 12, 2007]
We had the minus 30 for about 6 months. It happened after our content system created a bunch of pages with the same file names but in different directories.
We changed our system
Renamed pages
contacted Google for reinclusion but did not get out.
We then went back and removed all incoming paid links (about 20)
Changed the over optimzed home page
Did some code clean up
Then after 6 monts we were back to number 1 when we searched for ourdomain.com
Here is the I think part. We have not been "out" for about 3 months but when I go to Google and type in ourdomain with no .com we come up on page 5 or 6.
Do you guys think we are still some what in this penatly?
I was hit by minus 30 on January 2007. I'm #1 for mydomainname.com since May but nothing more. Everything else ends up above 30. It's some kind of mutation :).
that makes sense since ranked sites probably got more links from people than those in 30+. I know, I did get more links once the 30+ was removed.
when one of my sites's recoverd, domain name went to no.1 for 2 months, before other pages came back
It's a 6-month-old site which has attracted a lot of backlinks. It gets a PR of 5 after a 4-month live.
I believe it was penalized.
On May 1, a search on “mysite”, the homepage could be seen at 40+ (most of other sites above it are linked to mysite). However, a search of "mysite.com" the site is at the top.
On June 14 (or 15?).
An update on backlinks were observed. A search on "mysite" would give a home page at 3 (or 4) while the rest were located close to the last page.
Today June 24. It's back to its normal position with the rest of the site (more results from www.mysite.com)
Hope it will stay there.
Walkman, can you refresh my memory as to what items you feel attribute to the penalty and to the release? Was there a re-inclusion request filed and what was the time-frame.
Thanks!
Oak
I had someone tell me to do another reinclusion but I wanted to run it by people here first.
our with .com came back May 1st.
do you guys think I should wait or submit a reinclusion?
- Our "with .com" search started showing as #1 about a week before the whole thing came back, as others have mentioned. Interesting.
- Our formerly top-referring keyword search is still not back to former #1 glory (still around 51) but most everything else that was top 10 is now back to top 10, perhaps one or two lower than before. I'm wondering if we now have a penalty on the one keyword or else it's just slower to resolve. We did remove some internal links to that topic which could explain it.
- We recently switched to a better back-end technology which helped to eliminate lots of messy coding that we might not have been able to find before. I suspect this was a factor in our recovery. We made massive improvements overall so it's too hard to say.
- We had never done any link buying so that was not a factor. Some odd inbound links might have been a factor.
Good luck to everyone! I know your pain.
I will just spam a site in its place. Live by spam, die by spam. All fair game.
