I’m woke up this morning to find that my site(s) appear to have been hit by a penalty – I have not received anything through webmaster tools, but the sites have dropped at least 50 places for all search terms. Obviously this is upsetting, but I must have done something wrong and violated the google terms.
The problem is, I’m really not sure what it is I have done wrong, and it seems there is no way to find out.
The only recent changes I made were to add quite a few links to some related sites, and a few to a non-related site, as well as add a new page containing some affiliate links. I’m guessing this is the problem, so I have now edited all of the links to add the ‘nofollow’ tag. I have submitted a reconsideration request and I hope this is the problem and therefore will be resolved quickly. I was hoping to get your opinion on this as well though – is the nofollow tag enough, or should I completely remove the links?
And one more question; a sub domain to the effected site has also dropped by around 50 places in the search results – is this normal, or have both sites been independently penalised?
Thanks for any advice you can provide.

Regards
Tom

Can i believe such tool?

Also, I have checked with webmaster tool and everything is working fine, but still i have doubt that my site is under Google’s penalty…!

IS there types of Google penalty? like serious,worst,bad…

Looking for your valuable response…

Ram Gunjal.

Please see http://www.liftingsafety.co.uk/category/load-arrestor-spring-balancers-1139.html
this page is one (1764 pages in our website, average 500 in site:www.liftingsafety.co.uk, which means 1264 are penalised for some reason) of the pages from our website that has been penalised by google (we use display:none; to hide and show more information ‘if’ the user would like to read more, could this be the reason for the page being penalised?
Also we use display:none; in the product pages in two instances: 1. To enlarge images on hovers; 2. To split information into tabs for easy reading; could this also be doing us harm?
I’m sure this is not ‘the’, but ‘one of’ the reason why our website has lost 1200+ pages from site:www.liftingsafety.co.uk since june (when we revamped titles, colours, layouts, navigation, urls) this year. We have changed lots of things since we realised pages were dropping e.g. layouts, the use of headings, colours, styles, robots.txt, sitemaps. etc. I am now at a loss because i have no idea why our website is doing so poorly, after doing so well.

Any help or advice would be of great help, as i say, i have no idea where to turn. Nothing seems to have any effect. I can’t help thinking its something small that’s having such a big effect, please let me know you ideas.

Thank you, Philip

Thanks for the blog, brilliant resource!

I am sure you recieve many thousands of individual emails with people pushing their own agenda so I have resisted emailing you, however after discussions with others I think your perspective could be useful for others. That said can I trouble you with a query?

We are a UK based retailer (circa 200,000 unqiue visitors per month) and have for the past 5 years been top of rankings for ‘tyr e s’ and other related searches – we are the UK’s largest at what we do with the deepest information resource for online surfers – we have recently recieved a penalty from Google, we think for putting in place a 301 redirect from a partner ‘white label’ version of our online store, diverting to our ex-partners own URL, as our deal had ended. I say it is a penalty but we recieved no notification, we still appear for our .com searches at the top but everything else we dont climb any higher than 50th.

We have a number of commercial links, all brought on in line with the Google guidlines, some of which we have removed just in-case. We have documented all of this and resubmitted a few weeks ago.

We are sure we have done nothing untoward and we are all very concerned that given we have followed all the rules, by the book, despite our resubmission no recovery looks like it is on the cards and no feedback or guidance looks like it will be forthcoming.

Could you possibly help, please?!

Many thanks in advance Matt

Well, that’s very good news. Glad to hear that Google is working with webmasters to solve the problems on their sites ( legitimate webmasters anyway! ). I for one am struggling to get a penalty removed from my site. My site has been penalized and I really dont know what the reason is. Since the penalty, I spent a lot of time working on the site. Removed spammy listings ( or listings that I thought were spammy, submitted by my users, changed the site’s layout, made it even more user-friendly, etc – but i failed to see any good results.

So, the bottom line is that for me, a legitimate webmaster, who runs a site that used to have 7000 unique visitors a day and now it’s down to 300-400 visitors / day, this news is like fresh air.

Thank you and will keep an eye out on Google sitemaps for some tips:)

Warm wishes,
Jonas

I have a client site that is being penalized to the high heavens and I have no earthly idea why. Can you please help me? I work very hard to make sure the site has good, relevant content and try not to be spammy. It is KeithDobbs.com. I would love to know what’s up.

Can you please give me some insite as to why the site has been removed entirely from the rankings for all relevant search phrases?

We seem to have been subjected to google penalties 3 times now, and whilst the first 2 times we think there may have been an issue that we’ve then fixed (both accidental linking problems, none spam attempts) this 3rd time leaves us baffled – nothing has changed on the site since we were (apparently) re-included a couple of weeks ago.

We wonder if we’re being penalised at all or if it’s just down to algorithm changes?

I know you’re very busy, but I’d love to be able to discuss the problem with you if you can spare 5 minutes of your time, we’re all pulling out hair out here!

- seb

It’d be nice to get an email saying why – but I’ve not had one yet!

Cheers,
Erek Dyskant