I just learnt last week about Google's 30 position penalty, I'm sorry if you all already new about this but I found it totally fascinating that big G could impose such a thing. This guy who I do a bit of business showed me one of his sites that had been hit by this, priar to the site getting hit the site had many no.1 positions in Google, the guy came up with some sort of scam to get backlinks from Google, Google clocked on and they hit the site with a 30 position penalty, now even if you type in the exact domain name it will never rank above position 30, the site still has a PR5 and it ranks 30th for some well competitive phrases but it will never go above that no matter what. As soon as the site got hit the guy removed the backlinks from Google, it has been 6 months now and Google still hasn't lifted the penalization.
Did they send him a letter saying "you have been hit with a 30 position penalty"? I mean, is this a formal thing, or just a guess from the guy when he found his site back a little bit in the serps? It could be a coincidence. It could be a fluctuation that righted itself after some internal update.
I don't believe in the 30 position penalty...he was penalized and google takes a long time, sometimes a year before your penalty is fully lifted.
It's true I've seen it a couple of times too. You just need to apologize in a letter to google and hope they give you back your position soon. Thank You
PR?!?!? Since posting in http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=157780 my allinanchor: dumped out of the top 200, other terms are now ranking, yet none are breaking 30 - and all indicators are showing me some should. So what do these sites have in common? Anybody own more than one with this problem? My guess is they are heavy with inbound links from pages with query strings... mine certainly is.
I think time is going to be the only healer here. What exactly did your friend do to incur the penalty to begin with?
I've seen this happen to a few of my sites, one recovered after about 60 days the other is still bombed
google doesn't know what they are doing so they keep updating hoping to get it right and fix all the problems they cause but they never get it. they always keep making bigger problems with their updates and this is part of that. and the sandbox is just a bunch of baloney as well. there is no truth to it. it is just a myth which is used to discourage new people to the game. you can't fool everyone.
He came up with some sort of scam to get backlinks from google.com so he deserved it really, he has now fixed the problem and it is 6 months on and he still won't rank above position 30 unless you type in a really specific search term from his site that yields less then 30 results in which case the site comes up last every time!
Before I read some post here I thought its just me that was thinking about this 30 position penalty. Oh good I'm not alone. Thanks!
My site was struck with google 30 penalty on october 21st. Its almost one month and there is no sign of recovering from that. Will any one tell me on what basis google has penalized. And what are the ways I am going to recover. As far as my memory goes we have been doing white SEO and we haven't adopted any illegal method. we were ranked in top 5 postion on our major keywords. But now we are on the fourth page.
Could you give us more details about what he did, do you know? I would like to know so I know what not to do.
I was penalized too, black text over black image backgroud although the html background is white....yes I know, pretty silly