My Recent Experience with a Google Penalty

[jstover77]

One of my big money makers got penalized (not banned) recently. We had over 500 terms on the first page and many that were high level keywords driving huge amounts of traffic. Then one night at around 11 pm I noticed the traffic suddenly dropped off to nearly nothing. I checked my ranking reports and there it was...we dropped to 4-5-6-7-8-9-10th pages with all terms. A loss of over $100K per month in revenue.

So after a couple of days of hanging out with Jack Daniels and feeling sorry for myself I figured it was time to get back to work and get her fixed. I figured we were not banned, just penalized, so therefore I would comb the site and try to fix anything that did not follow Google's guidelines.

Now, I have many sites that I own that have had zero issues so it made it a bit easier to narrow down the issues. That is unless one of our competitors reported us, which would not surprise me because it is a cut throat niche.

So long story short we removed any potentially incriminating offenders and filed a reconsideration. After waiting 2 weeks we got a response back from Google saying that our site was still in violation of their quality guidelines, but they did say that we need to remove or fix duplicate pages on our site and then file another reconsideration. I said to myself "wait did I just read that right"? Google actually told me in a round about way what we did wrong, which is new for them.

In conclusion, we removed over 500+ geo pages on our site that were very similar to each other with minimal changes on them such as the title tag, description and a few minor changes in the content. I also had a article syndication script on the site which was taken off. I submitted another reconsideration to Google and we are praying that this time works.

So my question is, has anyone here been penalized in Google and gotten their site back to were it was after reconsideration?

[Pjman]

Yeah, I did about a year ago. I had a traffic exchange on a part of my site. I no followed all the links and filed a reconsideration request and we were back in business a day after we heard back from Google.

Then Panda came on Feb. 23 and messed that all up. Been fixing things since Feb. I have a few more things to fix and then I might file another reconsideration request.

[BobLong]

I am currently dealing with a penalty that came down on two similar sites I owned on the same day as the int'l panda update. Not fun. Haven't really done much as both sites have a fair amount of paid links. Still milling about deciding on whether to wait it out or just file a reconsideration request.

Aside from the paid links, I can't see anything I've done wrong. One site does have a section with some fairly redundant similar content, might try to consolidate those pages and decrease the ads a little (Could be seen as bridge pages). Just sucks because I want to make sure they are good to go before I submit reconsideration request. Keep us posted and I will do the same.

[centipede]

jstover, you are so lucky in that Google told you what to fix. The lack of clarity and transparency in the penalty process is maddening. I currently have 60+ of my sites penalized. (Not all of my sites, just a subset.) I have always strived to do everything right - quality, unique content; I never buy or sell links, etc. I have fixed things that I guess are potential problems and filed reconsideration requests 6 or 7 times. Each time all I get back is the boilerplate "We've reviewed your site and we believe that some or all of your pages still violate our quality guidelines. If you wish to be reconsidered again, please correct or remove all pages that are outside our quality guidelines."

I'd fix the problem if they'd only tell me what it is. So frustrating.

[tangor]

Welcome to WW, kiddo. Interesting story. Pardon me if I don't believe a word. Not being rude, I just don't believe the following:

So long story short we removed any potentially incriminating offenders and filed a reconsideration. After waiting 2 weeks we got a response back from Google saying that our site was still in violation of their quality guidelines

Too much historical (and hysterical) evidence on the web exists that G doesn't work that way. I like the Jack Daniels touch, been there, done that! But this part does make sense:

we removed over 500+ geo pages on our site

Google, these days, is all about SHRINKING the web... scaring webmasters everywhere, killing or quelling any new webmasters. And GEO is all about web cam / location and they want complete control.

[Dan01]

Where did you guys see that you were penalized, or was it just a drop in traffic? Was it in Webmaster Tools... under?

Tangor, you are right. Google does want to shrink the web. I have heard Schmidt say that the internet has become a dump - trash content etc.

I am not sure that a sitewide penalty, like with Panda, makes their SERP results better. In fact, I think think it does the opposite.

[jstover77]

Google, these days, is all about SHRINKING the web... scaring webmasters everywhere, killing or quelling any new webmasters. And GEO is all about web cam / location and they want complete control.

Ya what we think we are going to do is just build individual websites for each geo location. Buy a EMD or something close, separate IPs, create Places listings for each, submit to local directories ect ect. This could be also good because if one site gets hit it does not affect all the others.

We are hoping that deleting all those geo pages are going to do the trick. After that I will be at a complete loss to what the issue is.

From what I am gathering from reading many boards is there really is no answer to the Panda issue. Even guys who have been doing this for 10+ years are baffled.

I guess I just continue to try to make my websites better, and pray.