How can I come back from a penalty if I don't know what I did?

[scot184]

On the subject of Google penalties, how does a site ressurect itself? Especially if they've no idea what it is they've done?

Is it just a matter of time or? Can anyone out there list popular reasons for receiving a so-called penalty?

Thanks.

[edited by: tedster at 6:17 am (utc) on July 1, 2008]
[edit reason] moved from another location [/edit]

[tedster]

The first thing is to be sure that you have a penalty, and it's not just an algo change that caused your rankings to fall. There's a good thread on this topic in the Hot Topics [webmasterworld.com], which is always pinned to the top of this forum's index page:

Am I penalized? What type of penalty do I have? [webmasterworld.com]

Google's official Webmaster Guidelines [google.com] are another resource. and you should always check your Webmater Tools account for messages, or at least some hints in the reports for your site. Sometimes there is real help in there (and sometimes not so much).

Beyond that, sometimes it is just a matter of time. Your site may be a kind of edge case that was incorrectly flagged by the algo as fitting some spam profile or other, and then the algo gets tweaked and you get released. but in the mean time, if your ranking drop was severe, I suggest some intensive study of the threads in our Hot Topics and the other resources I mentioned.

[jackson992]

whatif multiple sites have been missing since Jan lol

[Lorel]

I find that most people who experience a rank drop (for no apparent reason) often think it's someone else's fault, like a hijack. What usually turns out to be the problem is they have too many things wrong with their site that eventually trips Google's trust threshold for one or more reasons and down they fall, i.e., they usually have several of the following: a cannonical problem, a mixture of full and relative URLs, lack of quality links, duplicate titles and descriptions, shared hosting with thousands of other sites, navigation in javascript, important keywords only in images or flash, not setting up redirects when deleting pages, overoptimization, etc.

[pageoneresults]

I find that most people who experience a rank drop (for no apparent reason) often think it's someone else's fault, like a hijack.

That would be me with me "Tin Hat" on.

What usually turns out to be the problem is they have too many things wrong with their site that eventually trips Google's trust threshold for one or more reasons and down they fall.

That is so true! The other thing I see happening is as technology improves and the bots become more intelligent and do things that they didn't before, it opens up a whole new world of challenges from a technical perspective. SEO really has gone high tech and has been for quite some time. Before we didn't care what got indexed, now we have to be "really careful" in what gets indexed, talk about a 180 turnaround. It is Brain Surgery to the nth degree! ;)

Another challenge that many have usually resolves back to something in DNS, their hosting provider, etc. The bad neighborhood concept applies across the board, not just with links. Ever read any of the SpamAssassin docs for scoring email spam? Those are a real eye opener. If they use those types of rules for email, I can safely assume that many of them are also used by the "more advanced" search engines like Google. :)

[tedster]

they have too many things wrong with their site that eventually trips Google's trust threshold for one or more reasons

A classic place where I've seen this happen is the "custom" 404 page that really goes 302 >> 200

A site with this flaw can start out doing well in the SERPs, but after a while (and it can take a long while) so many urls get indexed that all point to the "custom error content" that the rankings all fall apart. For sites with a Webmaster Tools account, you will find that Google now tests for and warns about incorrect 404 handling. In fact, they do not let you verify the site until the issue is fixed.

[nomis5]

What is "a cannonical problem" in simple English? You have me scared now because I don't even know what it is!

[tedster]

"Canonical" was the name that Google engineers came up with for situations where their indexing cannot easily tell which version of a url is the intended one. The most common problem comes from the same content being accessed whether the url is with the "www" or without "www".

There's a lot of discussion about this in the Hot Topics [webmasterworld.com], which is always pinned to the top of this forum's index page. In particular, see:

Why Does Google Treat "www" & "no-www" As Different? [webmasterworld.com]

SEO advice: url canonicalization [mattcutts.com] - from Matt Cutts' blog

[proboscis]

Another challenge that many have usually resolves back to something in DNS, their hosting provider, etc. The bad neighborhood concept applies across the board, not just with links.

Can we talk some more about that? I know some hosts are more strict than others about what they will allow but beyond that how would you know if this is causing problems for your site?

[pageoneresults]

We could but it might divert this topic which I don't want to do. We have discussed the Hosting challenges recently and in the past. More can be found here...

2006-04-23 - THE - Trusted Hosting Environments
Are you at risk in your current hosting situation?
[webmasterworld.com...]

2008-02-25 - Can you Trust your Host with your SEO?
Are you certain that your host is not the root of your challenges?
[webmasterworld.com...]

[outland88]

The problem with a lot of these theories is you would show at least some corresponding drops in many search engines or at least a few. That just doesn’t happen. Either those search engines are too forgiving or Google is just too demanding. More than fixes many of these things should be viewed as counter-measures to offset Google hurting a business.

To me a lot of what is going on now though is related to Google optimizing its results with additional data from Double Click.

If anything Google is to aggressively targeting duplicate content. The problem is doing that causes all sorts of collateral damage.