How do you find out if you have been penalized by Google? One of my sites has suddenly dropped out of Google rankings, but still in the index. Whenever I post something new, the site re-appears on the first page , but few hours later disappears again. Any ideas? Any tips etc?
I don't think so. If it's almost a year old it shouldn't be doing this. Have you been social bookmarking your own stuff? If so, there's talk that Google is possibly penalizing sites who get a lot of social bookmarks from the same accounts.
Because they don't want people bookmarking their own stuff. Google can tell when the same account bookmarks stuff from the same domain over and over. Are other people Digging your articles, or just you? Because when one person bookmarks a bunch of stuff from a single domain that no one else, or few others, also bookmark, it's a huge red flag. Right now it's mostly speculation, but there was a big deal about Google starting to penalize people for bookmarking their own stuff after the first of this year. I've seen it myself, so I stopped bookmarking my own stuff as often and my rankings have improved a lot. Now I bookmark only my very best articles, stuff I think will have other people also Digg it.
Thats weird, I usually type site:sitedomain.com to see how many pages are listed. if none then it can take sometime to get reindexed.
After creating content for your site, submit them to different high PR social bookmarking sites like digg and stumbleupon. This would help you for indexing of your pages. You can do it by your own. Just submit your articles once, and don't spam on them.
If your ranking are down than it doesn't means you are penalized . You must check the keyword where you were ranking good . Those keywords got new data and considered more powerful . Update on your keywords and data and I am sure you can get your rankings back .
Its just that there are more competitive sites with the same keywords that have outranked your site in PR
Thanks for the replies. I haven't digged a huge amount of articles, only 10 or so, and they have been digged by other users too. I was ranked number 1 (even before wikipedia) for my keyword and it is the only keyword i really get any traffic from, its not a competitive keyword either. Now im nowhere to be seen in Google My pages do appear when i do site:mysite.com
WoW This is Really interesting i really don't know anything about this ...Thanks for this information