penalized for misleading domain name?

is an unrelated proper noun misleading as a company name

[swampscrapper]

My company name is the same as a astrological term and is also my domain. Is it possible that I have been penalized? Here is an example: If a company's name is Milky Way Publishing and they own the domain www.milkyway.com does google penalize because it is not actually a site about the milky way but a site about publishing? hope this makes sense.

[takagi]

Don't worry about that. Google will not penalize a site for that. Penalizing is about identical content, hidden text (keywords), linking to link farms, doorway pages, etc.

[John_Caius]

No, that makes no difference at all. Google is not a site about 10 to the power 100 after all.

It's a different kettle of fish if you have hidden text on your site, e.g. meta tags, which doesn't match the viewable text - e.g. you're trying to steal traffic by getting ranked well for britney or sars when your site actually sells blue widgets.

Why do you think you have a penalty?

New sites often have an apparent PR of 0 (or <1) just because they haven't been crawled yet or have no significant inbound links.

If your site used to have a PR of e.g. 6 and now has a PR of 0 then it's more likely that you've received a penalty of some kind.

[vitaplease]

No relation in my opinion (apple.com being penalised because not being about apples?)

Are you sure other things are not playing a role?

- server down during deep crawl?
- hidden text/links
- purchased expired domain with grey past?
- overdone cross-linking?
- accidental robots text mix-up?
- adult content and safe filter settings wrong?
- any other things come to mind?

[dunnthat]

Not a problem.... otherwise fourseasons.com and apple.com would be in penalty heaven.

dunnthat

[swampscrapper]

Ive been reading through posts here for a few months and I cant for the life of me figure out why the site was penalized. At one pt. i was quite ambitious with my metatags but since have scaled down and made it a realistic list of keywords.

Could it be the site's been penalized beyond recovery?

Do you suggest a new domain or perhaps a new career?

[John_Caius]

What makes you think you have a penalty? Has your PR dropped significantly? Have you been doing anything unscrupulous? Are you linking to bad neighbourhoods?