[admin: if you delete this topic, pls PM me the reason for it.] Does google penalize sites by lowering the sites ranking or devaluing the sites rank? Or there is nothing like this ... they just have one form of punishing sites ... ie by dropping them completely from the index. Is it possible that all pages of a site has suddenly dropped in the search rankings ... say from page 1 to page 10 ... is it one form of googles penalizing ..
Lots of times google rankings fluctate with out any real visible reason I have sites disappear from their rankings, and evn go pr 0 then come back even better a couple month later. I don't know its a penalty that wore off or jsut some mix up with the data
Does google penalize or does it just drop sites? from my limited understanding they can sometimes do either or both, but as has already been pointed out sites can just drop out of serps for no apparent reason at times. I lost all serps for about 5 weeks once due to a server crash when the big G went mad with its bots @ 10 pages per second.
That's an interesting question and I don't think anybody knows for sure. Google claims that all their SERP placements are done automatically. However I'm sure that they do practice human intervention under certain circumstances. I'm certain that a number of years ago a certain well known name in the SEO business reported to Google that a hypenated domain of mine was spammy. The site suddenly dropped out of its top ten ranking and a cached page could not longer be found in their records. I wrote them and they responded that something about my page must be in violation of the TOS, but the wouldn't tell me what. I wrote then a full explanation of the reason and rationale behind everything that was being done with that page and within a week or so the page was suddenly returned to it's original placement. Now that event, both the removal and reinstatement had to be done by human intervention. However if you remember that they index more than 8 billion pages then you can see that it would be impossible for them to review and penalize every page that happened to have some minor condition that they might not approve. So I'm confident that 99.99999% of the movement of pages in and out of the SERP placement is done by their automated system. it just appears that their automated system is working far from perfect these days. If a human does intervene then I think they remove you from the cache and from the index completely. Then you have been penalized and the penalty is banishment.
nice data, compar. In addition to removing a site from the index, i m suspecting that theres a way to penalize ie devalue a site and its links... one variable in the whole function ... and presto the site is screwed Yes almost everything is automated but such a big search engine will surely have around 10 to 20 ppul just to tweak things here and there .. in case of red flags raised by certain factors.
If pagerank and backlinks for a site are back to like before this weekend, that can´t be a penalty - why is that site out of the SERPs for its top keywords then? Those keywords didn´t drop a little, they disappeared... I´m getting hits on that site for rather irrelevant keywords now, site´s not changed - what´s the deal? I´m used to fluctuations, but a complete whipeout of top KWs on a solid site still makes me wonder...
How long does it take to be reinstated after correcting the cause of a penalization? Say because of having a link with the same anchor text on a site with 22,000 pages?
I'm very interested in this too as I have some sites that suddenly aren't getting cached. They still have PR (5 and 4) but the main page (some inside pages are still getting cached though) doesn't have any cache available. It is a very strange phenomenon. Should it concern me?
No! Google is so screwed up that you can't believe anything is your problem. The greater probability is that it is their problem. Remember what Mcdar said: Google is Perfucked!
Remember the thread. Missed the reference. http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showpost.php?p=74100&postcount=121 Yes, it is. Several ways, really. I wonder if they are going through and dumping the cache, and creating a brand new one, to fix the 302 redirect bug. I think that is why PR was down over the weekend, to perhaps test a new heuristic. They determine ranking by cache, and there are caches of redirect problem pages in it. If they still hold backlinks, flushing & recacheing plus applying a new process for crawling would fix that. Sites devalued by the bug will start to gain, and eventually those they link out to, and allow PR to be distributed properly. Look at what all has happened and is happening to rankings and backlinks in the last 10 days or so. Add the PR hiding, or re-distribution of work for the servers it uses. Don't worry. Be Happy. So far, I like what I am seeing.