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Heavily penalized site-- suggestions for recovery?

Discussion in 'SEO' started by dkalweit, Jan 2, 2007.

  1. #1
    Hello. In Jagger, October 19th of 2005, my first site, The NES Files(http://www.nesfiles.com/) took a beating(domain since 1999). It went down from 6k visitors a day down to 2k or so. It dropped again early in 2006 to almost nothing, and has floundered in 1k land since(much of it is robot traffic, I'm thinking). In the past few months, the former PR5 disappeared to replaced with the dreaded PR0. It now gets roughly 10-20 google referrals a day, if I'm lucky. I was getting over 1000 referrals from google.com alone at the site's peak.

    Now, I'm desperate for ideas to revitalize. The reason it was so heavily penalized, is due to abuse of the DP coop and Linkvault. I had a lot of weight, and spread it across many NES-related terms, including the top 20 or so game names. I ranked very well for many of these before Jagger killed me. The coop and linkvault were removed by November of 2005. I've issued many re-inclusion requests to Google over the past 1.2 years or so, with no luck. It's hard to say things can get much worse, as google traffic is almost nil.

    Any advice for getting this quality site back into the good graces with Google? White-hat SEO seems fruitless. re-inclusion requests seem to go unread. Should I get a new domain name and start fresh with my existing content? Is there someone at Google that might actually listen to my repentent cries for mercy? Or should I shrug this off as a harsh lesson learned to not anger the evil gods at Google?

    Thank you for any and all ideas.


    --
    Derek

    P.S. This isn't the only site that I had effectively killed by Google, but this is the primary one I really need to revitalize right now. Hopefully I'll be able to use any ideas on the others as well...
     
    dkalweit, Jan 2, 2007 IP
  2. fsmedia

    fsmedia Prominent Member

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    #2
    Pray to the Google suppor team.

    [​IMG]

    but honestly, get links pointing to your site. start submitting to directories and just build it up again...
     
    fsmedia, Jan 2, 2007 IP
  3. dkalweit

    dkalweit Well-Known Member

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    #3
    Yes, but if I'm penalized, would it be better to do that with a fresh domain, or this existing penalized domain?

    My current rankings for many terms are far below the natural rankings that nesfiles.com should have(and did have pre-coop). There's crap pages in the top 100, yet nesfiles is no where in the top 100. It's clearly a penalty and not just a lack of backlinks/age/onpage SEO...


    --
    Derek
     
    dkalweit, Jan 2, 2007 IP
  4. mad4

    mad4 Peon

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    #4
    If you lost a bunch of links after stopping using the coop then you need to rebuild the links from other places to replace them.

    Just because a site used to rank doesn't mean it still deserves to rank. Maybe your competitors have more links and better trust.
     
    mad4, Jan 2, 2007 IP
  5. dkalweit

    dkalweit Well-Known Member

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    #5
    I'm comparing now to pre-coop, not during-coop. I'm also looking at the results themselves, and many of the competitors after page 1 and page 2 aren't even on-topic, and are definitely not ranking for the keywords due to inbound links with anchor text of the keyword in question-- they're just Google farts... Many of them have 0 reported backlinks in google...


    --
    Derek
     
    dkalweit, Jan 2, 2007 IP
  6. mad4

    mad4 Peon

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    #6
    Pre coop was either early 2005 or even 2004. That is a long time ago and the algorithms have changed a lot. I'm not saying its not a penalty - I don't know and neither will most people.

    The only thing you can do is get hundreds of high quality natural links to the site.

    Also you have a spammer loose in your forum. :)
     
    mad4, Jan 2, 2007 IP
  7. dkalweit

    dkalweit Well-Known Member

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    #7
    If you check the backlinks, there's currently 398 backlinks for www.nesfiles.com.


    Maybe my moderators are on vacation...


    --
    Derek
     
    dkalweit, Jan 2, 2007 IP
  8. Angeleyes

    Angeleyes Peon

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    #8
    I would think that starting with a new domain would be better, and possibly redirect your current domain to the new one. Unless you really want to fight for this domain to build back up.
     
    Angeleyes, Jan 2, 2007 IP
  9. mad4

    mad4 Peon

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    #9
    Have you seen this?

    Angeleyes if you redirect the old domain to the new one Google may redirect any penalty as well.
     
    mad4, Jan 2, 2007 IP
  10. dkalweit

    dkalweit Well-Known Member

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    #10
    Yes. I blocked both of the proxy IP's they utilize(hence the cached error page). I also included this information in a reinclusion request to Google about 3-4 months ago. Deaf ears, I tell ya...

    And yes, I thought the same thing about the redirect-- I figure a duplicate content penalty would be less risky than a 301 redirect from a penalized site... Especially if Google doesn't like the site I'm duplicating the content from...


    --
    Derek
     
    dkalweit, Jan 2, 2007 IP
  11. GRIM

    GRIM Prominent Member

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    #11
    My honest opinion you need more backlinks, you also need to rebuild that site! I looked at it and I'm not seeing it being that 'seo' friendly at all. Huge, huge ads before you even get to any content and you expect to rank well? Years ago that may have worked well, but times do change.

    I do not run these types of ads so possibly the spiders do not even see them? Even if they do not, the likely hood of people linking to your site drop dramatically given it's current layout.

    Sorry but I see design being a serious factor here..

    I'd get links and rethink your ad strategy.
     
    GRIM, Jan 2, 2007 IP
  12. dkalweit

    dkalweit Well-Known Member

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    #12
    Huge ads?!? There's no more than one Google Adsense unit above the fold on any page. Ads are, really, the only way this site makes money-- take them away, and I might as well not care about the site anymore...

    And no, the spiders don't really see javascript ads such as Adsense.

    What's not SEO friendly about the site? Details if you can-- it was re-built recently in PHP with SEO in mind(and was built the times previous with simpler SEO in mind as well).


    --
    Derek
     
    dkalweit, Jan 2, 2007 IP
  13. GRIM

    GRIM Prominent Member

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    #13
    The huge ebay ads, was not even thinking of the google ads. But together you have to scroll and scroll and scroll until you see the content of the page.

    Your meta descriptions also sorry to say read more like meta keywords than descriptions, in other words they sorry to say suck IMO.

    Your description should not sound so forced, it should blend with the actual pages content not a rambling keyword infested phrase such as you've got.
     
    GRIM, Jan 2, 2007 IP
  14. dkalweit

    dkalweit Well-Known Member

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    #14
    That's certainly not black or grey hat. Using the one term more than 3 times can sometimes be considered spammy, but using the same word more than 3 times in seperate terms, I wouldn't think would be spammy... Even so, I find it hard to believe one internal link title would cause the whole site to be penalized... There's something far far far bigger than on-page optimization that got this site penalized...


    --
    Derek
     
    dkalweit, Jan 2, 2007 IP
  15. dkalweit

    dkalweit Well-Known Member

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    #15
    The ebay ads are part of the content. There's other content above and below the links to buying the specific game on Ebay.


    --
    Derek
     
    dkalweit, Jan 2, 2007 IP
  16. GRIM

    GRIM Prominent Member

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    #16
    Ad's are part of content, not how google works I'm afraid, especially if it's a manual penalty.

    As far as the coding above I'm talking about it with your meta description and the rest of the site, to me it's damn near the very definition of 'spammy' and as such google is reading it that way.

    You don't think that's spammy? :eek:


     
    GRIM, Jan 2, 2007 IP
  17. dkalweit

    dkalweit Well-Known Member

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    #17
    Crap. I just checked the code, and I had two variables-- $title and $cTitle. One was the title of the page, and one the title of the game-- instead of adding the title of the game in the meta desc, it was adding the title of the page that many times. I fixed it:

    http://www.nesfiles.com/NES/Millipede.php

    Google is supposed to mostly ignore meta tags, last I checked...

    Thanks for the catch, btw.


    --
    Derek
     
    dkalweit, Jan 2, 2007 IP
  18. GRIM

    GRIM Prominent Member

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    #18
    Meta keywords they don't even look at, I find meta description VERY important in how google not only lists you, but also for ranking purposes as well... Even if they don't use something for ranking on the 'good end' they can use it for penalizing you ;)
     
    GRIM, Jan 2, 2007 IP
  19. dkalweit

    dkalweit Well-Known Member

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    #19
    Still hard to believe they'd penalize to the point of removing my PR... On a PR5 site, and another site not mentioned here that's gone through the same thing that was PR6...


    --
    Derek
     
    dkalweit, Jan 2, 2007 IP
  20. GRIM

    GRIM Prominent Member

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    #20
    I say it's a combination of things including your huge amazon ads, extremely spammy meta's and other html coding.

    I had a site stripped of it's PR for less than what I'm seeing on your site.

    Those amazon ads to me are not 'content' not even close, they are not unique content they are nothing more than ads. When looking at that site it looks like nothing more than one big spam fest in my honest opinion. You have content, but you have to scroll down forever to find it.
     
    GRIM, Jan 2, 2007 IP