"Penalty" remedy?

[bedlam]

Hello folks,

A customer of mine submitted his site (which is a 2 year old, information rich site for a brick-and-mortar business) to some kind of spammy outfit, and (I think!) as a result, his site has all but disappeared from Google's search results (but still ranks #1 and #2 on MSN and Yahoo respectively for a relevant search).

Here're the symptoms:

1. [Formerly high-ranking] site does not appear in Google's results for a particular search phrase (well, not in the top 100 anyway...it's somewhere in 576000 results)
   
2. A Google search for "link:www.example.com" returns zero results
   
3. A straightforward Google search for "www.example.com" yields zero results [!]
   
4. A search for "+www.example.+com" (in other words to find references in other pages to the site name) yields some results, but most of them, when you look at the page are some kind of identical generated page. Weirdly enough, these pages appear not to exist any longer (though the problem is quite recent). I can only see them in Google's cache, and when attempting to visit any of them I wind up on a "this domain is for sale" page.

So my question is, is there anything I can do to un-fubar my customer's site? Or is this something that time has to take care of?

There is nothing at all spammy about the site itself, and the content was developed strictly in order to be useful to customers - completely natural language, no keyword loading etc.

Any suggestions?

-B

[ogletree]

As long as you don't link back to them it is not the problem. If it was then I could go to those sites and hurt my competiter.

[bedlam]

As long as you don't link back to them it is not the problem. If it was then I could go to those sites and hurt my competiter.

Hm. Good point. Seems obvious now that you point it out.

Any ideas what might be going on with the SE such that even a search for www.example.com yields zero results?

-B

[ogletree]

do you get anything when you type site:domain.com

[hamster77]

Haven't had this happen in the last year or so, but when Google was doing its monthly updates I used to get a site dropped from time to time. Just fell out of the index for the month and then came back in the next one. No reason except that Google just 'lost' the site from one update to the next. Maybe sites still just get lost sometimes?

[BigDave]

Did the "spammy outfit" ask your customer to do anything on his own site?

I have trouble believeing that they would just sign him up without asking for anything in return.

The only other thing, if it really is a penalty, would be if there were other problems with the site, and being listed in those spammy pages pushed the site over the edge on what was tolerable.

Or it could be one other thing now that I think of it. Does part of their program include position tracking of the site in the SERPs? And if it does, was the position tracking done from a system that has the same whois information as the website?

[bedlam]

Weird.

Yes, I get the site as expected with a "site:example.com" search.

I don't know what they asked the customer for, if anything. They can't seem to figure out any who or how about these links. I do know that nothing was done on the customer's pages, because it's me who makes any changes on their site.

As ogletree pointed out, it doesn't seem that likely that the spammy pages are the root of the problem, so I'm not sure what is.

-B

[ogletree]

I have had pages just dissapear for a little bit before. They just came back. Google is very weird these days. A search I watch just changes widly all the time and I know there are no changes to the top 10 sites at all.