Pirate 2.0 penalty... what to do when innocent?

[ImBatman]

We have a website that we believe was unfairly negatively impacted by Pirate 2.0. The webmaster claims the site has never had issues with DMCA Takedown notices or copyright claims, and when we search for the site on the Transparency Report tool from Google, we don't see any previous complains or filings. And yet our penalty checker tool says the site was hit "Extremely Negatively" with a probability rating of 100% by this update.

If a site is hit by an algo such as this, one cannot do a reconsideration request to my knowledge... So what can be done? Anything?

[tangor]

Call me out of the loop... what is Pirate 2.0?

[Wilburforce]

"Pirate" is an algorithm filter that affects sites with a high number of DMCA take-down requests.

our penalty checker tool says the site was hit "Extremely Negatively" with a probability rating of 100% by this update

Which penalty-checker tool? How does it evaluate probability?

If the site has never had a DMCA take-down request it is more likely that the tool is at fault than that Pirate is the culprit. Is there any material on-site that has been scraped, or is very similar to other content? It might be worth running some pages through Copyscape if you haven't already.

[Robert Charlton]

Which penalty-checker tool?

Mod's note: ImBatman... don't answer that question. ;-) Seriously... we briefly discussed Pirate 2.0 in a thread you started a year ago [webmasterworld.com...] ...and your reference to the specific tool was changed by the moderator then to "<one of penalty checker tools>". Let's keep it that way.

The Google Forum Charter [webmasterworld.com] provides more background on why we try to avoid mentioning of SEO tools that aren't in general use, and why New Users are more restricted about what they can post than members who've been part of the community and reached Junior Member status.

[Andy Langton]

Most penalties checkers use historic ranking data and a database of when Google updates occurred. Of course, they have no specific data points about your site in general. If you made disastrous changes to your site or Google made other changes that we're not in your favour just before a listed update, you'll likely to be told that your site was affected.

Worse still, some of the historic ranking data is going to be totally irrelevant. They're usually based on predetermined lists of popular keywords - not the keywords you care about.

It might be that such tools will give you some ideas about where you should be looking, but regard them as a starting point - rather than final judgement.