My blog is penalized what to do ?

[charmi2008]

I have been running a Website for around 1 years and the website has been getting great rankings in google continuously for the past 6 moths.

Suddenly I lost all of my rankings on Google 2 weeks back. I have not engaged in anything new or anything which is not allowed by Google and dont know the reason for this penalty by Google. Google Crawl Rate has come down sharply.

I have digged into this forum and gone through various discussions but I am still not able to find a clear reason for this penalty. I believe I am following all the google guidelines. There is no change in Pagerank too.

I would like to state that I have done the steps given below:

1) Submitted my Sitemap again in Webmaster Tools.
2) Have been adding content to websites daily.

Even after following these steps and waiting for few days, there has been no change / improvement.

The only point that comes before me is that there have been few brief outages ( 5 minutes ) in the past week. But can this be responsible for this huge loss of rankings. My Traffic is around 1/3 of what it used to be.

Could someone please guide me as help me in finding the problem so that I can fix that.

I shall be thankful to you.

[tedster]

What kinds of things have you been doing to get new backlinks?

[charmi2008]

we do bookmarking only and one direct link from another website which have PR 3.

[Sorin]

@charmi2008,

Can you confirm if the traffic loss started on Dec 28th?

Your situation sounds like the one described in this thread...

[webmasterworld.com...]

[indyank]

interestingly you both have blogs which are almost 1 year old...may be those bookmarks have lost value now...

[Sorin]

@indyank,

I started the blog with zero backlinks and I accumulated more and more as the blog got more content...I would imagine we should get more values from bookmarks instead of less.

[TheMadScientist]

I would imagine we should get more values from bookmarks instead of less.

In a simple world yes, but in a minty fresh Google world... +Bookmarks +New Inbound Links = More Important Now ... (relatively of course) ... If the links gains stop and the bookmarking stops (relative to other similar sites or even relative to the pattern of the site you are referring to itself) the pattern says Less Important Now.

To get a better understanding of what I'm talking about, check out the patents linked in the Google Hot Topics thread: [webmasterworld.com...] and also read back through some of the threads about them.

IMO Freshness, Link Churn, Historical Data are going to be the important points in the patent apps and threads to decide if those 'aged' links are worth more or less than they once were.

I know I didn't really answer your question directly, but I think understanding how things work might give you a better idea of why they worked the way they did, then you can focus on doing something to fix it.

[ColedogUK]

Careful with the word penalty. you can drop down the SERPs with no penalty and most times when you think you have been penalised its webmaster paranoia at work and a normal functioning of the algorythm or minute change to the algorythm - not a personal penalty applied to your site.

TheMadScientist gives a good suggestion as to one possible normal function that has resulted in your drop. (I believe that the relative velocity in links/ bookmarks compared with your competitors is becoming more important as Google applies Social Media indicators to determine relevancy in search).

Are your pages still indexed i.e. can you see them with the search function site:yoursite.com ? Has the number of indexed pages changed substantially? This would be the best indication of a penalty applied to your site. Aslo see webmaster thread: [google.com...]

[Planet13]

we do bookmarking only...

sorry for my ignorance, but what do you mean by bookmarking?

[Sorin]

@TheMadScientist

Thanks for the links and info. While I did got many links lately, including from higher ranking blogs linking to my articles, it is a good idea to go back and re-check everything again.Thank you again!

@ColedogUK
Not sure about charmi2008 but in my case the indexing process continues as usual and all the articles I write are indexed with the same speed as before.

[tedster]

Planet13, I assume this means "social bookmarking" - the most well known site for that is delicious.com

[indyank]

delicious.com...hmm...forget that now but does google still count the other social bookmarks (other than FB, twitter, and a few others)? I don't see normal users using them any more...People who use them still are those who want to rank their own sites, either through self or contractors...

[edited by: indyank at 3:52 am (utc) on Jan 14, 2011]

[indyank]

but FB and twitter are different as they are being widely used, though many shares/likes are blind ones...