Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
It definitely is minus penalty - all terms for every keyword are beyond page 5 (even site name)
I've never brought a link or sold anything.
I did a press release last month and got another link from yahoo directory and business directory. Also an SEO company made a mistake and wrote 15 unique aritcles and posted them to 12 sites each. Each article used the same keyword - but i was already top for that keyword. (they've been removed now).
will i recover from this? how long does it take? is is just a google mistake that will rectify?
Not to hijack stevy777's thread, but these spammy links were from 30-50 different domains
However,
If you are seeing something happening in July-August, I think you should really look for what you've done (or what was done to you) in April-May if not earlier. Most of junky sites are of little value to Google and I would presume it would take them a very long time to collect all the new links let alone process them. If all those links were from PR6+ sites constantly pounded by GoogleBot, then, first of all, hats off to your ability to fund your marketing efforts, and second - you may be seeing results a little earlier but still not immediate. And third, too: I don't think those links would qualify for "bad links" even if themes are not directly related.
Regarding the time delay: that's been my experience, anyways. Sometimes you really wish there would be a more direct action/feedback relationship with Google because by the time one issue creeps up you might have done a few more changes and so never know what actually tipped the balance off.
Every keyword for my site puts me five pages down the search engines but i still getting 100 uniques a day from google.
What does all this mean?
my site under the minus 50 penalty now moved back to a PR 5 - is this good. Google also have indexed more pages.Every keyword for my site puts me five pages down the search engines but i still getting 100 uniques a day from google.
What does all this mean?
Means that you are penalized, probably manually.
Every keyword for my site puts me five pages down the search engines but i still getting 100 uniques a day from google.
I would be filing a reinclusion request right away, after first ensuring that there are not issues with links on the website itself.
Take a long period of time to assess the website objectively, even ask for a second opinion from others.
There are instances where a -50 is applied accidentally to websites. In your case, this sounds as though it is a possibility, so once you are absolutely sure everything on the website is great, then contact Google with a very specific request.
Other than that I believe we're 100% legit. No paid links. No hidden text. No bad neighborhoods that I know of at least.
I'm at a loss on what to do. We are currently 80% down in traffic due to this. I can maybe hold out 3 or 4 months like this.
My question is this: Was there any body else that got hit on 12/19/09? Was there an update then? Suggestions?
Are you still under -50, or have things resolved?
1) Duplicate content (we've recently converted from a full retail site to an affiliate shopping mall type of site).
still under the penalty - two days ago google gave me an automatic email saying they've reviewed my site for the reconsideration request - but still no change
I got a -50 within the past week, and also recently got a second Yahoo Directory listing (to one of my inner pages, about 2 weeks ago). I have seen others get multiple directory listings with no negative impacts, but I saw this as a direct similarity with your situation in your original post.
But they have "considered reinclusion" already and then lowered it from a -50 penalty to a -40 penalty. yeay :¦
what other things have you been doing to reconsider.
i'm hoping it's automatic. Right now i'll be happy if after a year i loose the penalty but i just wonder if it will be forever
when searching for my site name i'm on page 5 or 6
C
1) I have read recently that Google is spidering javascript and reading the links. I have always had javascript tracking code that has a line containing var = "page url". I know for a fact that Google is reading these as links and attempting to spider them, because I see it in GWT. The problem is, they may be counted as "hidden links" since they are not visible to the visitor, and I have read hidden links MAY contribute to this penalty. Obviously, this was unintended, and I have changed my tracking code to auto detect the page url, so that the page url isn't embedded in the js. Not sure if this will help but worth a try.
2) I have noticed an upswing in the number of good sites, valid resources, linking to my site using nofollow in references (unsolicited). They reference my site as resourceful, and it doesn't seem fair to tell the search engines to "nofollow". I wonder if Google interprets a large number of nofollow (especially an increasing number) as an attempt at link buying? Wasn't the purpose of nofollow to help Google determine paid or useless links? Maybe I misunderstand it's purpose, but I think it defeats the original idea of using links as a "vote" for a site, when resources are hoarding their PageRank with nofollow.
Just some thoughts. These are two factors that have jumped out at me today. I am tired, so I hope this all makes sense. :)
C
2) Even a large number of rel=nofollow attributes has no effect on your ranking. The original intent of this attribute (or so it was said at the time) was to protect a site owner from dubious links in user generated content. The paid link thing was a later addition to the Google campaign. However paid links are far from the only reason that sites use the attribute. And as long as it is in place, there is no shadow cast on your site. At most it means advertising links that line up with Google's guidelines.
My page hasn't been cached since Jan 13, so none of my changes are reflected in G yet. Things just seem to be stale unless you have a blog that gets indexed hourly.
What do you guys think about the LOSS of trusted/established links is a possible trigger? I know we can go on and on and on about possible causes, but this is another factor in my case. I wonder if asking for those to added back would help or dig a deeper hole.
I'll also say this, I don't believe linking back to index with the same anchor text across your site would trigger this penalty. We do this extensively and never thought twice about removing it when we were hit. I've read a lot about this theory on penalty posts and would love to hear from someone who thinks this was the main factor in their penalty.
I think that there is a common misconception about affiliate websites. Google is fine with affiliate websites, so long as the website provides value first, and then directs the user to a helpful product or service. Nothing wrong with that, since a) you provided a great website first.
I think where affiliates get into issues is thin affiliates - very little unique content, very little creativity.
The affiliate game is changing fast across all fronts with the ongoing Adwords affiliate assessment, so for the sake of your users, your consumers, and your competition, it only makes perfect sense to expand your website and cater to your community first.
You can have your cake and eat it, too.
Sorry to read about your site penalty but imo its all part of the learning curve.
Some here may disagree, but imo its very easy to trip a filter these days and its more likely that your -50 is automated. A re-inclusion request wont help imo, your site is in the index, it is included, it just doesnt rank in high positions. A re-include wont change that.
More likely you tripped a filter, as a result of your link profile, a sudden rush of links on low value sites and blogs could have caused it coupled with a low link profile to start with.
What you need to do is look closely at your site, clean up any duplicate content issues (just in case its not link related), look at your internal link structure and tidy that up (remove overuse of keywords in internal links) secure links from QUALITY sites to up your authority level in your space.
A number of good quality links will help improve your trust level and will counter a number of junk links that deliver negative effect.
If you think about it, even the best sites on the net will have junk links from scrapers and blogs pointing to them. No site can avoid it but what the best sites have is a number of great links to them from authority sites that endorse their trust status.
As a guess i would say that with a bit of work, in possibly two page rank and link revaluation updates you could be back up and ranking well(Inside of six months) could be sooner with luck on your side.
Good luck to you
Rich
A re-inclusion request wont help imo, your site is in the index...
The request is now called a "Site Reconsideration" request. The change in name means you don't need to be gone from the index to submit one. The submission form is in Webmaster Tools, and here's Google's description from the WMT page:
If your site isn't appearing in Google search results, or it's performing more poorly than it once did (and you believe that it does not violate our webmaster guidelines), you can ask Google to reconsider your site.
Yes, it can often take months, but I have also seen sites clean up their problems, submit a request, and have their rankings pop back within days. Google suggest watching this video about making a Reconsideration Request [youtube.com].
What then ? Wait or forget it ?
My guess is that when this happens, Google manually checks it and they probably determined (right or wrong) that you got those links there.does that mean competitors can submit a re-inclusion request to have Google search your website manually and determine if there should be a -X penalty?
