I didn’t see any message in Webmaster Tools saying I did something wrong. I fixed what I could come up with and asked for reinclusion. Two month later and still hoping someone will just give answer. Both sites were top ranking. One of them for many years. Suddenly they are -50.. Is there any way to get some answer or help from anyone in Google? Is this manual edit/penalty?

I believe I made a mistake by linking between our sister sites and our distributors websites. These were not paid for links.
Can that kind of advertising cause a penalty with our rankings?

I didn’t wait for an answer.
I just corrected the issue by removing the links and requested a reconsideration request here – https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?hl=en

Was that the right thing to do?

Reading your blog it seems that this penalty thing is a real hassle for everybody: Google, because i guess you guys have to spend a lot of resources in catching what you consider the bad players; the webmasters, because we all of a sudden we stop benefiting from Google traffic. But the end users suffer as well, in my opinion, because when the reasons for the penalty are not clear and the webmaster has no clue on what s/he did wrong, if any, good chances are that a good site stay penalized forever and that a good resource about a certain topic don’t show up at all in the search results.

Althought i understand that dealing with what probably is an incredibly huge number of penalty explanation requests would be almost impossible by Google, i also believe that a little bit more of clarity should and could be made by Google about these phantomatic penalizations. At the end, i cannot believe that you would not agree on the fact that a big part of the penalized webmasters have read, re-read and read again the Google TOS and are absolutely in good faith and that if they only knew what the hell has caused the penalization they would take action for good and they would avoid to repeat the mistake in the future.

I hope i’m not sounding like venting, but the frustration is really really big, for those like me who make playing by the rules a starting point, in life. Speaking briefly of my situation, i run an adult site of which i am the main model as well. I have never hired SEO companies and i have never sit down and planned a SEO of my site; the reason is simple: i want to play by the rules and i want to just focus on content. Until March 2007 i was doing good with Google for several 2-3 words keywords and i was pretty happy with it; i was not on the top10, but i had several pages from my website and many articles from my blog receiveing nice traffic coming for relevant and related keywords. All of a sudden, overnight, this changed and i am not getting ANY traffic at all from Google since then, but when people search for my name on Google. Even searching for my name in quotes followed by the word “porn” without quotes do not return my website. After having read articles, posts and blogs all over the Net for months, in August i arrived to the conclusion that only two thing might have triggered my penalization:

1) I had a javascript on my homepage checking the users’ browser language; if the language was Italian, the user was automatically redirected to the version of my website in Italian via javascript redirection.

2) I used my blog rss feeds to feed my affiliates with promotional content; this created a situation where my blog articles appeared also on other websites (those of my affiliates).

I thought that rss feeds was made exactly for the purpose of feeding others with your news, but never mind: in August 2007 i did the following:

1) I deleted the javascript from my homepage
2) I started to write completely different, original articles to feed my affiliates so that since then my blog articles can be found only on my blog.
3) I went to my Google webmasters tools center and applied for reinclusion explaining that point #1 and #2 was what i thought i did wrong, that i fixed it and that i would have not fallen into it again.

Well, of course i haven’t heard anything back and my site is still ranking on Google only for my name. It goes alone that Google competitors rank my site well as they ever did and that i don’t know anymore where to bang my head in order to understand why Google hates me so much.

Don’t you think that maybe the TOS shall be a bit more clear, if it’s not possible to have our matter dealt personally by anybody at Google? I understand that the algorythm needs to remain secret and hidden, but i hope that you also understand that it is not funny to be penalized and feeling helpless and clueless about it. I think that at least the webmasters tools area should have a sort of red-light showing up when your site is penalized: this would not solve my problem, but at least, knowing for a fact and for sure that i have been penalized and not having any clue on why, i would put my mind at ease and it would save us a lot of hassle, time, headaches etc. In fact…have i been penalized??

Thanks a lot in advance for reading this long post, if you did lol And if you didn’t well…thanks for giving me the space to express my opinion in here.

Sabrina

Google sending email to webmasters to tell them the reasons their website got penalized, is that a myth or reality ? If reality, does it work also for french websites ? This matter to me because it looks like we got a penalty from Google 1 week ago and since, we are trying everyday to find out what we did wrong. I have read and read the guidelines dozens of time asking me if there was anything on the website dedicated to search engines instead of visitors, when it could be the case we made changes to avoid any mistanding but, in reality, we don’t know what we are looking for… Is there any GG human emailing french webmasters about what is wrong ? Thanks for your time and I apolgize for my school english.

Interesting article by Jill. I’m not sure I entirely agree, but you always do want to have the best site possible for your visitors. Then again, you would need to get those visitors, huh.

Anyway, there’s been a lot of talk about the PR penalties for paid links. My site was one of those who received the penalty. I do understand Google wanting implement this policy for their search engine. My problem is that the solution Google requests of using the “no follow” option either forces you to effect all the search engines or the whole page. If I use the “no follow” attribute in the link itself, then it not only tells Google not to follow the link, but Live, Yahoo, and any other search engine that pays mind to it. If I use the robot.txt, I can specify that only Google shouldn’t follow, but then it applies to the whole page, including my navigation menu, links to announcements, etc. I want to comply with Google, but both solutions are overkill. What’s the Chinese proverb about using a cannon to kill a mosquito.

So, I think I’ve come up with a solution, but I’d like your opinion on whether Google would be alright with this (and it would work). I was thinking of putting any paid text links in their own I-frame. The I-frame could have the robot meta tag telling Googlebot not to follow the links. This way Google’s terms are met as we are not selling text links without applying the “no follow” for Google. Google also will still be able to follow the other links of the website which do not need the “no follow” tag. We also will not be excluding the other search engines, who do not have the same standards as Google.

Do you see any issues with this solution?

KS

PS – Since the “no follow” is actually supposed to indicate that a website does not vouch for a link, Google might want to consider creating a new robot attribute like “paid link”. That way Google could still discount the paid links, and the “no follow” tag could keep it’s original meaning. The “paid link” attribute could effect the Googlebot differently as well where the bot could still follow the link, but not apply any link credit. – Just an idea.