I suffered the + 50 penalty. My domain is PR6, and it just appears on the 5th-6th page of google, it was on 1st-2nd page till November 2008. Even when I search for the company name, I can't find it before the 5th page. I have deeply looked into my site, and found just a masked H2 tag (it looked like a common text), removed it and filled in a reinclusion request more than 1 month ago.. But till now, nothing changed, still in 5th-6th page. Can anyone take a look into my site and try to find something wrong? I can pay for this..
This happened to me. You just need to wait for ages. They'll get loads of reconsideration requests. Go to google webmasters group in google groups and post there. Give your URL and state what you did wrong.
I rather doubt it would be caused by one masked H2 tag. More likely it was caused by not varying your link anchor text enough.
I cant believe this rubish... So a non webmaster (but owner of best site in a niche) places wrongly a H2 tag and gets hit by a penalty? How stupid is that? Google is penalizing people for this? If they are they are playing with fire cause at the moment lots of people are smelling fish with -50 penalties and rolling their heads... OMG... People, Google algo is just plain dumb and can't figure it out witch site is better than other. Simple as that. That's why so many of us got penalyzed.
Is your domain PR6 naturally? Or have you bought links to achieve it? If so, thats why you're penalised.
No, they aren't. This is likely caused by something to do with his linking profile. Christ you people get reactionary.
If its an affiliate site, you may just need to add some new content... -50 can happen to what Google calls 'thin affiliates' that just have landing pages without much unique information. If this is it, add some videos, some more pictures, more reviews, kw-related content, etc... Something like this happened on one of my sites, I just kept adding content and now its back on the front page, almost in the top five.
I just love when you guys get all upset by my comments and YET none of you show true data/G statements to back up your claims. Really? One of my penalized sites has more than 50 pages and its not an affiliate site. How long did you wait to get that site back up? Cause this -50 penalty looks just a Google glitch to me: its total random, picks old sites, new sites, sites with links, sites without links, sites with lots of content, sites with no content... you name it. This penalty has been hitting people that doesn't even know what the hell is HTML... So what do you say about it? They did too much link building? lol They don't know what is that. Over optimization? Sheeet, sites that got hit never had a H1 or meta tags or keyworded content...! I know you got many more like these ^^... but relax. You guys need to learn that many of those "penalties" are just a stupid and irresponsible glitch in Google's algo that is taking away good and solid sites from top spots and replacing them with lots of Spam and MFA's blogs.
I doubt it's anything you 'did' - just reflecting the fact that the algo changes all the time. Just keep creating backlinks and adding unique content, and you'll get back up there. Big drop tho - page 1 to page 5. Ouch. Especially if its your main earner.
Yeah do that and if you do get a -50 penalty, just come here and wait for some comments about "too much links"... Tell me about it: from 2-3K per month to $1 per day.