Main Domain Penalty or Sub Forum Penalty

[Rockzer]

Hello All,

On May 15th 2012, I got a penalty from google, bcoz of that traffic was down I am not just not able to figure out. I got a message in google WMT, saying Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.example.com, We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines. I have a sub forum as well, its main domain penalty or sub forum penalty URL of my sub domain forums.example.com. Can you please guide how to tackle or handle this situation. I have deleted most of the pages from sub forums, but still I cannot any improvement in my traffic. Or do I need to delete the pages from main domain. I have almost 45k articles on my main domain that is example.com Can you please guide me.

Regards,

[edited by: goodroi at 9:27 am (utc) on Jul 4, 2012]

[goodroi]

For a site with over 45k pages you don't provide many details about what you could be doing to offend Google.

Did the Google communication mention unnatural linking?
Have you ever bought links?
Have you ever used hidden text or cloaked content?
Does your site use scraped or auto generated content?
How many unique words are in an average article?
Why do you think its the forum and not the article pages?

[Rockzer]

Hello Goodroi,

We never did anything unethical or aganist google tos, our website was under development for 2 years, When we initially took our site live we had a slow page loading issues, so kept our site offline. Then re developed our site again and took our site live 2 month back we received a penalty from google, we never followed anything unethical ways to get rankings and building links for our site.

[goodroi]

To be honest it does not matter if you think you have done anything unethical. What matters is if Google suspects you have done something unethical. This can be because someone on your team accidentally broke one of Google's rules or your website is creating a false positive on one their spam filters. Google has already told you that they have one way or another found you to be breaking one of their rules.

Have you done anything that would possibly make Google think you have bought or sold links?
How did you create 45k pages of quality content and not make Google think you scraped or auto generated low quality content pages?

[Rockzer]

GoodRoi,

Thanks for your valuable feedback again, We have categories called news, downloads, and videos on our site. We use to add press release from the official source and use to provide free downloads which was available for free on the internet. But I am not sure does google think that is a duplicate content which we added on our site.

[Robert Charlton]

We use to add press release from the official source and use to provide free downloads which was available for free on the internet.

This certainly sounds like duplicate content. What's not clear is what in particular you might have done that involved "techniques that are outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines".

From the Duplicate Content section of the guidelines [support.google.com...] the following jumps out at me...

(my emphasis added)...

Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results.

What proportion of your 45K articles involve dupe material?

[Rockzer]

Robert,

As I mentioned our site was underdevelopment from past 2 year, all our URLs, use to show site is currently offline. We took our site 2 months back online again, and we got a penalty for no reason @ all.

[tedster]

@Rockzer, a little pep talk. There definitely is "a reason" for your penalty - it's just that you can't spot it. Yes, Google sometimes makes mistakes, but even that is a "reason".

You need to get the mindset that there is a reason and you will darn well find it. Otherwise, you are dead in the water.

You say you "got a penalty" on May 25 - please describe the details of the penalty and not just Google's messages. What happened to your rankings, and to your traffic?