Fourth-page penalty?

Hehehe, you made me laugh, thx for that

 

I'll just say I had 3 sites do this. Two have recovered, one is still stuck on page 4 after a top 5 listing on a great keyword. Now you can't find it, even if you type the domain name in and search for that. Guess what... Page 4.

I mentioned this here a few months back and toyed with the prevailing notion at the time that it may have been a coop related issue - which will always cause an agument and a rash of conflicting experiences.

I don't think its the fact the sites were running coop as I did then, but I do think that suddenly gaining lots of irrelevent links by advertising the said same sites on the Coop may have been a contributory factor to innvoking this penalty. It would be great to get some clarity on this.

 

Hmm kind of scary to think that SERP's are being influenced so greatly by a factor still unknown.

I don't want to wake up tomorrow and be at 31 and have some spammer at #1...

oooo no good.

 

Just as another data point. I've got a site in this position too. It ranks at *precisely* #31 for a broad array of keywords for which it used to hold first page rankings. It even ranks #31 for its own site name.

I can add in as many terms to the search query as I want, literally copying an entire sentence from a page on the site, and as long as there are more than 31 SERPS, the site still ranks at #31.

The bad news is that this has been the case for many months. I've filed a Google re-inclusion request and it didn't help.

The site has several .edu links and a .gov link too.

 

Sarcasm isn't all that helpful...

 

Threadwatch is reporting on this, too - sounds pretty bona fide:
http://www.threadwatch.org/node/9302

Interesting thread move as well - sounds like someone's a bit trigger happy with the mod functions.

 

This penalty has been around for a long time now... almost a year. I have generally seen this penalty when someone has gets too many links too quickly... but over the past 2-3 months I think they turned up the knob.(more sensitive)

Currently I have a site at #31 for just about every KW. It ranked well on the first page before this... I think I remember this happening to this specific site right around the June 27th.

Also in the past (over 5+ months ago) if a site hit this filter it would stay on the fourth page for 30 - 60 days then come back.

 

I have been hot by this for 2 sites... both were ranking high for my keywords, and then suddenly, they fell to #31 - #34.... I heard that this might be because of COOP. I removed the COOP code, and sent 2 reinclusion requests to Google. One site is now back on the 1st page in search results.... second not yet, but I hope it will be soon

Did you use COOP ? Or any other link networks ?

 

Good info, thanks. Hoping it's a similar penalty length now.

 

when I found this thread, through I, Brian's blogline.
hooperman, funny post. I thought the same thing, coincidence - or some relation that was unseen, missing a crawl or something.

But then I went into the DP keyword tracker and checked my rankings. See, I have a site that is just about 6 months old now, and I expected to see some signs of getting out of the sandbox. I had, but the significance to not being able to break 31 for four weeks for allintitle: and a week for allintext: searches for a two word phrase did not hit me until then. You see, I fully expected to be on page 1, probably #1 for those 2 searches. What's more is that allinanchor: has been stuck at 34 or 35 for a month as well. (Just to round out the info, allinurl: is in the top 10, and has been in the top 20 for 5 of the 6 months the site has been up.)

Pulling up the charts for those keyword tracker entries shows it dramatically... jumping around, day to day, week to week, never breaking 30 for those searches. Then 31, flatline. Well, 34/35 for allinanchor:. While I have not been working hard on backlinks, I am beginning to get organic links, and there are several good ones yet to be found and cached by Google.

If it is a penalty, it is aside from sandboxing. I was on the way up, by all I have seen those 4 searches (allins) should be on page 1. This is something applied that is working as a ceiling for me, not letting me up to where it should be.

Feels like getting scroogled all over again...

And I agree, this is a Google issue and I bet there are alot more who are being shut down...

 

My fansite has been around 2nd in Google for the last year or so and now suddenly I've suffered from this problem too... I'm in the range of 30-40 for no understandable reason.

This sucks big time.

ps. Can a mod please move this thread to the correct section... it quite clearly isn't a website review.

 

Just to update this. The site seems to have recovered finally. However, this was some 2 years after the site initially got penalized, so it looks like a pretty long lasting penalty.

 

You must of done something pretty horrific then. After the -30 penalty, you're meant to be able to get back in after a few weeks if you corrected the problem.