How long do -500 penalties last and can they be reversed?

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I've read a few posts about -500 penalties but none that give a definitive answer as to how long they last or if they can be reversed. I've just received a pair of -500 penalties and would like to know.

I was ranked #3 for both keywords with two separate pages, both pages now rank 503 for those keywords.
If my sites subject was widget parts these two pages would be about widget games. My site is an authority on widgets but these two pages dealt with a semi-related topic, the games sector of the internet is well established.

The pages offered 3 free to play internet games related to widgets. Now I agree that my site is not truly about games but the pages are now receiving zero traffic from new natural searches and that's harsh. Is there anything I can do to reverse the -500 penalty on site, such as by building internal links to the page or mentioning the games more often or?

Have you managed to reverse a -500 penalty or found that it expired in time?

[tedster]

I've never heard other people zero in on a specific -500 penalty before. Other penalties that sent a site into the very deep SERPs were often automated rather than manual. Most of these penalties seemed to be for "over optimization" - and in one case I was close to, a single link from a trusted site removed the penalty. But in others, no luck.

Those penalties seemed to be released in a group - but that was on the old big Daddy infrastructure and seemed to me to be related to limited processing cycles. Behavior on caffeine may be quite different.

[Robert Charlton]

Behavior on caffeine may be quite different.

With regard to over-optimization, recent comments on the Update thread are suggesting that some keyword stuffing is being rewarded... which seems contrary to the general thrust of MayDay.

MayDay is appearing to rely more on co-occurrence and to respond negatively to occurrence itself. That said, I'm seeing what I feel are over-optimized pages ranking well, and on "short tail" haven't fully sorted out what the differentiation is.

Re having a subpage on a sector in which you're not established, I have seen for some time now, well before MayDay and before branding, a large shift to almost monolithic serps for certain sectors... where all sector-related articles, eg, not belonging to sites within the sector simply dropped out. But that drop has been more like to below 40 or 50 than to below 500.

Because of adjustments that might happen as MayDay gets used to Caffeine, I'd give it a little time before making any changes... but even if the pages do come back I'd consider this a hint that if you want to play in the games sector you might need to add a section of widget games-related content.

[Jane_Doe]

Have you managed to reverse a -500 penalty or found that it expired in time?

I have reversed quite a few pretty deep penalties over the years. I can only recall a couple I really worked on and couldn't get cleaned up on my own, and one of those ended up being a problem with their code and not anything on my site. In the other case a .org copied some of my stuff but I got the penalty, which really sucked. I had to start over with a new domain on that one.

Other than that though, for the stuff I've worked on most penalties are usually pretty easy to get lifted, unless maybe you've done something blatant. I'm not sure where the games stuff would fall. In my experience the penalties won't simply expire unless you clean up the site, and even then sometimes they penalize you for X more months, which I guess is fair enough.

[Whitey]

Sgt_Kickaxe - If you're saying this only relates to a couple of pages with off topic content , then it's most likely triggered by the algorithmn. So you might try tweaking the page to better reflect from a structural point of view why the subject is related on the overall semantics of the site. ie strengthen the relevance & as Tedster mentions he appears to have done this through an additional authority link to the page. Playing the thresholds of " trust rank " on the page can often avoid this type of thing.

My sense is that it's a filter , rather than a penalty. Chief suspect might well be an odd " off topic" link either outbound or inbound rather than the content itself , unless it's spammy - but it's a guess as we can't see your site.

If you're site is on the edge , and the links to you loose their authority this can send you down. If Google decides that all the links are suspect, then the effect of cancelling all their influence may trigger a " penalty " or a diminished trust score which means it's hard to win back favor in the overall scheme of ranking.

I have seen sites where off topic links have been removed and the pages sail back into the rankings.

Penalty reversal through reinclusion requests is sometimes a catch 22. If you're not 100% sure you've made the site squeaky clean , or cannot reverse such things as a link campaign , because the linkers won't co operate, you may dig a deeper hole for yourself by bringing it to the editors attention. Some folks I've heard from suggest that sometimes it's best to just wait and hope ( sometimes many years ). This example doesn't seem to fit this though.

Do these pages have original on topic content , and how are the pages linked to and by what ( internal / external ) ?

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Whitey, I've found only two -500 penalties on this site and they are indeed only semi-related to the subject of the site. Think weaving widgets and the site is about weaving but not widgets and Google favors widgets ahead of weaving.

I have a bit of a wrinkle with one of the two -500 penalties and it might offer some insight into how Google works. One of the two only partially worked to move the article down in the serps. I was ranked #3 for "weaving widgets" (example) but also ranked #4 for "weavingwidgets" (same article) which happened to be searched for about 55% as often. the penalty only applies to the keyword "weaving widgets" but NOT to "weavingwidgets". I'm still getting solid traffic for the later (despite not having the two words combined on page anywhere).

So, it's keyword based. I normally turn the lights out on penalized articles myself but this one was an excellent source of traffic, I'll try increasing it's footprint a little with internal links from new places BUT since it's keyword based I'm not sure I haven't simply lost ability to rank for that keyword.

Do these pages have original on topic content , and how are the pages linked to and by what ( internal / external )?

Yes, it's 100% original as is all content on the site. The pages are linked to from their primary category, from other articles I've mentioned the pages in and from some external places as well (ranging from weaving sites to widget sites).

Does this info change what you'd do ?

[tedster]

Maybe check the page's existing backlinks before going after another one that you can personally control. If the keyword is used in a lot of anchor text on already established backlinks, then don't keyword this new anchor text. Go with the domain name... or even "click here" and let Google pick up the kw relevance from the overall context.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I like the "click here" idea but I checked the backlinks, it has a backlink with the text "check this out" and on page I had those exact words and webmaster tools shows me it is on the list of keywords related to my site (only 2 occurrences).

A check of the same keyword relevance list in GWT shows that widgets is no longer associated with the site (according to google) despite it being on there a good 40-50 times (still not much when compared to the 180,000+ times the primary keyword is on site).

I've apparently lost the word sitewide and so can't get traffic that relies on it from Google. I looked 30 days back in GWT, when I was still solidly ranked, and the word is now off the list there too.

edit: I'm still going to see if I can get the article back to #3 from #503 if for no other reason than to learn more about Google. Learning that it's keyword based and that you can look it up in GWT and knowing that Google ranks pages individually but based at least partially on sitewide data it measures against other sites has been worth losing this page! It's like a game of mastermind, well, except for the fact that the colors keep changing when you figure it out.

[Whitey]

Yes, it's 100% original as is all content on the site. The pages are linked to from their primary category, from other articles I've mentioned the pages in and from some external places as well (ranging from weaving sites to widget sites).

What would you consider the strength of your authority is on these pages - does this need to be bolstered with some good authority linking in conjunction with the on page factors.

If those pages also appear a bit off topic to Google , do you have them semantically linked to internally in a heirarchy from several different linking angles to support them, all sending semantic relevance signals to Google .

I mean , how does Google trust your page is an authority on the subject , in it's eyes ? That would be the question to myself.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I'd categorize the strength of authority as excellent but covering topics only 50% related to the sites primary topic.

I wanted to follow up on this thread with reports of what's gone on but Google is not remaining steady in the rankings of these two pages. They now bounce between 3 and 503, as in either 3 or 503.

Midnight to 4am they are 503.
4am to 4pm they are 3.
4pm to 8pm they go back to 503.
8pm to midnight they go back to 3.

The site has a similar sitewide bouncing effect going on. Monday to Friday the site receives more impressions in Google than it does on Saturday/Sunday. According to Google webmaster tools the pattern has repeated itself for months. The site generates 6 figure traffic per month so it's not a small sampling problem...

With so much flux going on from day to day, and apparently hour to hour, it's rather difficult to get anything useful out of this. I'm shifting my focus to more important issues, like new content.