Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I’ve only seen public comments from Google regarding removal from the index as a penalty (as in the recent case of a German automaker’s website) but never seen explicit public indications that they have penalties other than removal. Can anybody absolutely clarify this issue?
Last year, Matt Cutts mentioned (at our Las Vegas pubCon) that Google was working to automate the gradual removal of penalties when the offending practices were removed. I'm not sure if that's in place now or not, but I would guess it is -- this conversation was back in November 2005.
They used to be able to push their luck, until a site got banned - then they knew where the line was, and could take all their other sites just far enough. Now, a ban is harder to get - but losing ground is easier. It's much harder for spammers to know if they've they've triggered a filter - or just not done a 'good job'.
Which may explain the 'new' spammer approach of creating millions of machine pages, hoping something sticks, currently the single biggest problem on the web, as every idiot in sight thinks they aren't 'cool' without a million pages saying nothing!
tedster, why do you believe there is a "minus 10 positions on the results" penalty? I have never heard of this. It is quite a dramatic claim I believe.
In the past, (around 2000/2001) Google would apply what WebmasterWorld members called +20 penalty to pages or sites which contained infractions against Google's webmaster guidelines.
If your page was normally ranked number 9 and Google found an infraction, your page would suddenly drop to number 29 in the rankings. Almost everyone was affected at some point in time. There were a LOT of discussions about it back then, but a quick search on Google brought up this one [webmasterworld.com...]
However, I wasn't aware this type of penalty was back and I believe Tedster did preface his comment with, "historically". :)
Whatever the reason, a site that had very good traffic, dropped shortly after with no search result any higher than 30th place on Google. This includes a search for its unique domain name and is born out by looking at google sitemaps which gives no average top position higher than 31. The site has now been in this position for some months -I guess I will have to be be patient for it to return.
Be interested to hear from anyone with similar experiences who has subsequently recovered.
The good news is that your rankings will bounce back ... just don't know how long it will take.
I am in the same exact position you are in. I also have sustained a 30+ penalty--from #1 to now no better than #31. Before December 13, I was ranking #1 for my numerous targeted search terms. Then immediately I fell to the 30's and have not returned in almost 7 months now. So I definitely feel your pain!
I am also convinced it was for duplicate content. I hired programmers who put up a dev.sitename.com mirror site to test the programming. Googlebot found it, crawled it, indexed it, and immediately (within 5 days) penalized for it.
I have filed 2 reinclusion requests and asked for forgiveness. Google is not in a forgiving mood.
I have heard that duplicate content penalties last from 3-6 months. Well I am now almost at 7 months and absolutely no improvement although I have worked my butt off adding and updating content.
I am only aware of the German automaker ban. If Google considered “doorway pages” enough to ban them, what can Google consider less deceitful to penalize but not ban? Eg, is “hidden text” less deceitful?
I'm not sure that a home page with a few lines of rye keywords on rye is quite as bad as someone spamming 5 million pages by various sophisticated routes.
And as I pointed out, a range of 'punishments' makes the spammers' life more difficult.
It's well worth reading Matt Cutts' blog regularly; he's careful to leave most things a little open to interpretation, but it's always an educational read.
