Your site has been penalised. Now what?

[superclown2]

You work hard for months or years building up a website. It's now very popular, producing a decent income for you as well as providing a useful resource that a large proportion of your visitors bookmark and return to regularly. Then, one fine day it disappears from page 1 and tumbles down to the nowhere land of page 6. Your income has gone, your business is in ruins. You suspect a manual penalty so clean up the site and submit a reconsideration request which is answered a couple of weeks later by a standard email implying that your site still breaches certain undefined guidelines and, well, hard luck mate. You have no idea what the problem is, the Google forum provides a multitude of conflicting opinions, your savings are running out and the bills are overdue so; what do you do?

Has anyone ever got a site back into a decent position in the SERPs after a Google ban? If so, care to share details of just how you did it?

[koan]

I had no luck resurrecting my pandalized sites and it's been months. It's a big blow.

[goodroi]

As a consultant I have resurrected several websites from penalties, filters and even total bans. It is possible if you know what to look for and how to resolve the issues that you find. Even though it is possible sometimes it is just better and easier to start fresh.

I have even intentionally gotten some of my less important websites penalized. Why? Because pushing the limits of certain tactics until you are penalized is a simple research method to determine just how far you can go & still be safe for your main sites.

IMHO working hard on a website is too often the wrong option. Many people still write custom meta keyword tags for every single page even though this meta tag is mostly ignored by Google. That is alot of work but not the right type of work. Working harder typically should not be your first action. Working to be smarter and educating yourself should be the first action.

In general people do not want to admit they are not smart enough or well educated enough. This might help your ego to feel good but pretending to be smart is dangerous. The internet world is constantly evolving and becoming more complex. Google is making changes everyday. So if you are not learning something new everyday then eventually one of the hundreds of annual Google algorithm changes will impact you.

[superclown2]

As a consultant I have resurrected several websites from penalties, filters and even total bans. It is possible if you know what to look for and how to resolve the issues that you find. Even though it is possible sometimes it is just better and easier to start fresh.

I think the problem for a lot of us is to know just what it is that triggered the ban in the first place; in the absense of link buying, thin content or other obvious spam techniques it can leave us scratching our heads. Care to elaborate on some of the reasons the sites you cured were penalised for?

[indyank]

If you are an habitual offender or you knowingly do something wrong, you will know what triggered the penalty.

Panda is not a penalty in google's dictionary and it is an algorithmic change.

It is unfortunate google has built so many penalty triggers in their system and genuine webmasters have to spend a lot of time on site maintenance to comply with their rules. But you will have to live with it.

Google forum provides a multitude of conflicting opinions

It is not just conflicting and wrong opinions. Have you ever seen a thread there in recent times, without their top contributors abusing the OP or someone else? To me, google forums is a battle ground and very few are lucky to get a reply from the real Googlers.

[nippi]

if its bad enough that google is telling you your site is still in breach, then the breach must be pretty obvious if you run

duplciate ccontent
stolen content
thin content.

analysis of your site.

Google pretty much penalises(filters?) for this, or for bought links and that's about it.

But yes, I've brought at least 20 penalised sites(massive drop in rankings or totally removed from Google) back to their existing levels.

[goodroi]

There are countless ways a site can run into trouble and unfortunately I do not have the time to cover them all. Here are some starting points to consider.

Can Google even crawl your site?
I like to think of wehn webmasters accidentally block googlebot as a self-inflicted penalty. Make sure the robots.txt and htaccess file are correct. Make sure a website is not 100% flash. Also make sure there is at least a link to any url you want indexed. You'd be amazed how many people don't even have one link to their content.

Is the content being crawled by Google unique & valuable enough to be indexed?
A unique page does not have 95% of the exact same content as 100 other pages on your site. Simply changing the title and the first sentence is not unique. Even if your page has significant amount of unique content that isn't good enough. You want the content to be valuable. I can randomly hit my keyboard to generate a unique page of gibberish but that is not valuable. Ask yourself if your high school English teacher would consider the page to be unique & valuable?

Are you using quality promotion methods?
You can promote your site using 100% reciprocal links from other sites that you own but Google will likely give you no ranking boost for doing this. If the backlinks pointing to your site are not likely to drive traffic themselves, it is likely they are not quality backlinks. Poor quality backlinks are much more likely to be devalued. If you lose 50% of your backlink value say goodbye to your rankings. If you use fake social profiles to promote your site, with no real human interaction, you'll probably experience a similarly bleak future.

PS Remember that some penalites are time based. If you fix the issue you may still need to wait for the penalty time period to be over.