What type of penalty is this? - nearly minus100

[onetry]

I recently got a hard penalty of my 2 years old site, white hat, some links, unique titles, good content, adsense.

I was hit from 1st page to 11pages; nearly 100+ penalty.

The strange thing is that also a subdomain with totally different website structure and content was hit.

This sounds really strange to me and my feeling is that it is not a good thing.

Any help?

Best regards.

[tedster]

Did this change affect just one keyword phrase - or every query that used to bring you traffic?

[onetry]

Tedster:

Every query.

My traffic dropped about 90%.

[tedster]

Then it's a penalty against the domain, apparently, and that usually happens from loss of trust, of some type. I know you said your site is completely "white hat" but apparently Google sees it differently right now.

I'd suggest pouring over the Webmaster Guidelines with fresh eyes, looking at your outbound links and inbound links, examining your pages to see if they've been hacked and had spam content inserted without your knowledge, and checking Webmaster Tools for any clues in those reports.

[randle]

What happens when you run a site command?

[onetry]

Tedster:

I was thinking the same things about loss of trust...but can't figure out why and how.

Just to be clear, my site is nearly completely MFA, however it is a good MFA site; it really offers useful content to users.

I did the following operations to try to recover:

- Removed some doubt outbound links
- Shortened and made more unique all titles tag and meta description
- Drop of about 50% suspicious keyword stuffing anchor text
- Removed 2 adsense banner
- Sent more than one reinclusion request
- Removed lots of alt tag and title tag suspicious keyword stuffing
- Checked in WMT but no messages
- Checked pages with no evidence to been hacked (where can I search in deep about this?)

Another thing very strange is this:

When I search for a term i.e "red widgets" I do not see page of my site that it is supposed to be indexed, I instead see another page of my domain ("cool widgets") that has "red widgets" only in link structure....google ranks the wrong page.

If my site won't be back in a while I think I'll take a pause from this world :-)

Adsense? Who cares :-)

! UPDATE !
The penalty seems to getting harder ... from minus 100 is gone minus 220 ...

[edited by: onetry at 9:20 pm (utc) on July 7, 2008]

[onetry]

randle:

I can see fluctuation in number of indexed pages but the number is almost right. Cached date goes back and forward...I don't know what's happened.

[tedster]

Checked pages with no evidence to been hacked (where can I search in deep about this?)

Run Xenu LinkSleuth on your site to get a definitive list of external links. If you've been hacked and your site was not defaced, then it is almost always for parasite hosting purposes. That is, it's done to place hidden links for the link juice or to spread a malware download.

[Whitey]

that has "red widgets" only in link structure....google ranks the wrong page

I'm seeing another site with a penalty/filter recently applied where the same is happening.

[edited by: Whitey at 11:42 pm (utc) on July 7, 2008]

[Whitey]

Run Xenu LinkSleuth on your site to get a definitive list of external links. If you've been hacked and your site was not defaced, then it is almost always for parasite hosting purposes. That is, it's done to place hidden links for the link juice or to spread a malware download.

What's the fix for this if these are identified ?

[tedster]

First and most important, restore your pages to their intended, clean condition. Then update your software on the server - bring everything up to date so that known exploits will non longer be able to hack in. And after all that, if you have lost ranking then submit a reinclusion request in Webmaster Tools.

In today's atmosphere of botnet building, parasite hosting and whatnot, checking for parasite links on a regular basis is a good thing to do. And up-to-date server tools are essential.

[onetry]

Tedster:

Using that software I found that lots of links (thousands) of my site are broken.

A mysql table that I use to track clicks was somewhat way "too full" and inserting data into caused the redirect to fail.

Now my guess are:

1) Restore previous version of site?
2) What actions can I do to speed up reconsideration/reindex ?

Tedster: a beer for you is ready here in Italy, a beer truck :)

[onetry]

However, I'm really disappointed that in WMT there was nowhere an indication of that problem.

[tedster]

Just be sure you have a clean version of the site online, and then be sure you've patched up the technical problem so that it can't happen again. Once that's done, you're ready for a reconsideration request. Be sure to explain what went wrong and what you did to fix it and prevent future occurences. That's what it takes. Be concise, but give Google the reassurance that's needed.

Also note that your site WILL receive a manual inspection - so if there's anything there that you feel is the least bit dodgy, get rid of that before you ask for reinclusion.

[onetry]

tedster:

Do you think that my site will be manually evaluated?

Look for last post "Introduction to Google Ranking" in Official Google Blog; some doubt is in my head now :)

[Marcia]

Let me add a "somewhat related" comment to this discussion. A site I'm working on cleaning up has had one of their pages/most wanted keyword phrases get bounced way down to #80, which I consider to be an "algorithmic penalty." I have no doubt that it's an OOP, so let me explain what's been done.

In the shopping cart, there's been a graphic put onto *all* the pages with align="right" that causes the anchor alt text to show up at the beginning of each and every page's H1 (equivalent - there is no semantic structure to pages, no h1, h2 etc.) - throughout the entire shopping cart.

That same graphic has also been placed on many of the site's static pages as well, in addition to the 1K+ pages in the cart, in the same way. The page/keyword phrase that's the target of all that alt anchor text is the one that's been hit.

I'm sharing this as a suggestion to check out going overboard with internal anchor text in the wrong way (including image alt text), as a possible candidate for an OOP.