Multiple sites banned. Do we need to fix them all?

[spanisheye]

I am helping out a friend who owns around 20 websites and between May and August 2009 they were all handed a -50 penalty.

I think most of the problems has been that he was interlinking all the sites.

Now, can we fix one site (ie, remove everything that's been done wrong) and submit it for reconsideration or do we need to fix ALL of the sites at the same time and then submit the requests?

Does Google consider other sites you own when reviewing a reconsideration request?

We would ideally like to get one ranking properly again and with that knowledge apply the same fixes to the other sites. It is a massive job as it is thousands of flat html pages so we would like to do it one site at a time.

Thanks for your responses.

[trakkerguy]

I had a similar situation last Feb. "Fixed" one site and the reconsideration request was successful. So I believe they just look at that single site.

I did fix some other sites and the reconsideration requests were successful for some, and not others.

I believe they looked at the sites and found some had no outstanding value to the web and didn't warrant reinclusion. Those that were successful had better content.

[spanisheye]

Thanks mate. I just heard from Google that the reconsideration request for the site we fixed has now been reviewed. So fingers crossed it comes back in the next few days.

[spanisheye]

Just a quick question. How long from the penalty lifted should I expect the site to rank properly again? It's been 24 hours now and I think perhaps our first reinclusion request hasn't helped.

Thanks

[StoutFiles]

It is a massive job as it is thousands of flat html pages so we would like to do it one site at a time.

While you're doing that I would highly suggest switching those pages over to php.

[TheMadScientist]

It is a massive job as it is thousands of flat html pages so we would like to do it one site at a time.

If you don't convert them to PHP, you could probably make the changes much easier (or more efficiently for sure) if you have a program like DreamWeaver (or TextWrangler on a Mac is even better for this) which allows for the use of regular expressions or (at the very least) multi-file find and replace...

There's really no need to go through each page on each site if there is any type of consistency and how many 'site-wide find and replaces' you will need to apply will probably depend on the consistency of the links and your ability to use regular expressions, but anyway, the point is there's probably an easier, more efficient way to do it than going one page at a time.

* Both mentioned programs allow the use of regular expressions and will find and replace in multiple files (even unopened files), but the TextWrangler regex engine is way faster and more efficeint than DW's... To give people an idea of what I mean when I say faster and more efficient: I was reformatting DataBase data one day with TextWrangler because I had 50 large files worth of data and kept crashing DreamWeaver trying to run the same regex I made over 100,000 replaces in less than 1 min across 50 files with using TextWrangler. (It was actually fun after I realized how much faster TW was than DW... I set a personal record of 498,000+ replacements with a single expression when I added quotes around the most of the data... Took about 90 seconds.)

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