Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I run a news.google.com published website getting decent traffic daily from google both google news and organic search.
Since last 3 days google traffic has dropped to nearly nill. At first I thought it might be Google playing with algorithm, now I am quite certain its a penalty.
Some declarations
1) I have never bought or sold links.
2) Never participated in link exchanges for PR (did it 2 or 3 times but nofollowed them. they r non-spam sites)
3) have over 450,000 pages indexed when searching using site: operator.
4) Over 90,000 News stories well linked internally
5) Get decent amount of backlinks daily mostly from blogs (and also from splogs who do nothing but steal a snippet from rss, but leave a backlink)
Symptoms
1) Traffic drop all of a sudden - no warning , no gradual decline
2) Earlier whenever I published a news story, on searching for a chunk of the text (or title), our site was always first.
3) news.google.com shows no specific change in behavior to my site.
4) We now rank front page for only the terms which are very very specific to our site. Earlier many times if we do a story on (say britany spears doing something silly) we would rank front page for related terms (organic search) now thats no more - see point 2
Possible Reason.
About 10 days ago, i started scraping google to find out whats hot on google trends and finding how it relates to google news search and giving them sitewide links from all pages. This I later figured was against Google guidelines. I have summited a reconsideration request explaining to google my situation and what I did which might have caused the penalty. I also promised never to do any such a thing again in the future.
Now my question is...
Can there be any other reason for this ban?
There are others whose traffic I am stealing, their business is loosing due to the success of my site. Could they have made any false spam reports against me? If so then can i see or respond?
Usually how long does it take for someone at Google to look into it, and how long does to see the effects of the penalty removed once a Googler decides to de-penalize me?
If this is a manual penalty, then even if it's removed, recovery can be gradual, stepwise, and take months - as if your site is on probation. And then again, some people find they jump right out of the penalty box within a week or ten days of asking for reconsideration.
My potential dirty deeds which might have got me in trouble... any clues if these may be valid reasons.
1) I have ads from tribalfusion on my site and I had enabled pop-unders(not porn or evil ones). These might have scared away potential genuine linkers and my ratio of good links had dropped (excluding splogers/scrapers) .
2) Had Kontera context links. Basically same argument as (1)
3) Google anti-spam personal gets pissed off when they manually visited my site and a pop-up blew up at their face?
On most forums and my blog, i write using my real name and identity... last few weeks i had some arguments with people about my site (both online and offline) Main one was relating to a news story which we ran with a PR company. Is it possible for them to kill my ranking? Making spam report, etc? <-- I live in a country where making even remote suggestions like this wont get me ridiculed so pls ignore my paranoia.
I say from the scraping and pop unders you have found your demise and can only try and wait it out. It is a really good thing they didn't cancel your publisher rights then you would be up the creek without a paddel.
Sumbit the reinclusinon clean up your act and wait it out. I will say you most likely will recover faster than most and as far as getting into heated debates be careful from now own and use another name.
I have scraped the pop unders totally yesterday. (it would come up only once per 16 hours / user) and was from tribalfusion ... It was my mistake of not realizing even Google hated it so much.
I didn't include the popunder part in the reconsideration request, but I guess if they visit the site again they would notice it.
possibly Unrelated : By the way since removing the pop-under, i began getting some stumbleupon traffic. Earlier the pop-unders/ups were scaring away stumblers..
The low traffic also gave me time to think... and do some housekeeping...
Still praying to things to go back as they were...
