Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I'm not sure what I did to get bounced by Google. Here are the 5 things I did:
1. I own several hundred domains I had with a popular domain parking company that pulls in articles in order make your domains appear that they have lots of content. I had a link on each one of the hundreds of pages pointing to my site. The links all were all anchored in the search term I was targeting.
2. I also own 5 other websites in the same area as the site I had bounced by Google. These sites are all pretty similar and have similar but not exact same content. I had links from all these sites pointing to the site in question. Some of the content on the home page of these 5 sites was exactly the same as my site that was bounced.
3. I was also using a popular domain linking service that created links that went 3 ways.
4. I used a popular paid blogging service to create 8 paid blog links to my site.
5. I changed the design of the site to CSS in May 2009 and went from position #54 in the SERP's to position #8 in a 1 month time period. I also optimized the home page for the 1 main search terms I was targeting.
All of this activity started in May 2009 and continued through August 2009. We peaked in Sept. 2009 and then disappeared to the very last results page for my main search keyword at the end of Sept.
Since Sept. I have read every article on SEO in WW and cleaned up my site. I dropped the linking schemes. I have removed all my domians from the domain service and eliminated the links from my domians to the site in question. I changed the 5 similar sites content so there is no more dup. content. I have added tons of content to my main site and I have gotten some good quality links to the site.
I'm not sure which of these things drew Google's wrath or if it was a combination of these things. I have cleaned things up and recently(4 weeks ago) requested to be reconsidered by Google through Google Webmaster Tools. They responded that they had reviewed my site and if it met their guidelines I would be reinstated in the SERP's. That was 2 weeks ago.
If anyone could help me figure out exactly what I did that drew Google's wrath I would be grateful? My other question is if anyone has gone through this before and once Google reconsiders your site how long does it take to reappear in the rankings?
If nothing else works I was thinking about shutting down this domain and transferring all my content to a new domain. I have over 600 pages of original content that I have written for this site over the past 6 months. Is this a good strategy if nothing else works?
have you read the WebmasterWorld threads about Google -950 Penalty [webmasterworld.com]?
there may be other threads linked in "Google Hot Topics - FAQs [webmasterworld.com]" that are relevant to your situation.
If anyone could help me figure out exactly what I did that drew Google's wrath I would be grateful?
I think #1 through #4 should have triggered a penalty, as they all apparently push Google's quality guidelines [google.com].
The CSS in #5 should not have been a problem. What kind of optimization you did, and how much, might have also caused some difficulties. Definitely do the reading that phranque suggests.
If you have a human editor from Google looking at your request, you should make it as easy and detailed as possible for them. Host it on a subpage of your domain and send them the link to it so they can go to your site to read.
Since you already sent it, wait another 31 days....
