A Google Penalization Story....

Discussion in 'Search Engine Optimization' started by Rated, Apr 25, 2008.

  1. #1
    Hi,

    I thought this was worth posting; any help/advice would be greatly appreciated!

    Here’s my story: A site of mine was doing really well in the SERPs, coming one and two for some great keywords.

    It has over 3000 pages of content, all of which are unique; contain pictures and helpful links which offer the reader more information on the same topic, articles were never below 500 words.

    One day, all the SERPs disappeared. Now, the only thing it ranks top 10 for is 'website.com'.

    The site now only receives traffic from Google images, 90% of the traffic before it was penalized was from Google.

    After investigation, I’ve listed the possible motives behind this penalization:

    Three days before the site disappeared, I sold 5 links on the homepage. (which I have now removed).

    Two weeks before the site disappeared, I added one affiliate banner per page, masked the link to: website.com/go/affiliate.php and disallowed the directory /go/ in robots.txt (which I have now removed).

    Lastly, the only other reason I can think of is theme links. I would say 50% of all my back-links are from blog themes, all of which helped me achieve these great SERPs over a year ago.

    I've sent of a reinclusion request in webmaster tools after removing everything that I think could have caused this to happen.

    Just to note, the site is included in Dmoz and Yahoo dir.

    The site isn’t a MFA, it's a real great addition to its niche and it used to receive some great comments whilst it was in G’s index.

    I’m not sure what to do about this from here on, a great site that had on average 5 new articles posted a day and helped out a lot of eager researches may as well not exist!

    Looking forward to your replies,

    Thanks!

    Lee
     
    Rated, Apr 25, 2008 IP
  2. dspohn23

    dspohn23 Peon

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    #2
    Sorry to hear that story... How many pages are still in the Google index?
     
    dspohn23, Apr 25, 2008 IP
  3. GameOver

    GameOver Well-Known Member

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    #3
    Im not sure why it happened, did you write all the content yourself?
     
    GameOver, Apr 25, 2008 IP
  4. chaitanya.seo

    chaitanya.seo Banned

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    #4
    But you are were already knowing that selling links may panelized you,
    Still you have done it,
    So currently wait for some time,
    "Hope for the Best Buddy"
     
    chaitanya.seo, Apr 25, 2008 IP