I've had someone approach me with what appears to be a site with a penalty. Previously targeted rankings are gone, and a cache: and info: on Google show nothing. Site doesn't seem to have done anything blackhat either - just a load of links from articles. Just signed them up to Google Webmaster Central and Googlebot appears to be crawling regularly, but an affiliate ID is this month showing as the "page" with the highest PageRank. Got to admit, I don't have much experience with Google Penalties so any comments on Google penalties - types, and how to deal with - would be much appreciated.
Submit your site to the Google Sitemap and you will have a clear idea if its been banned. Its also most likely that its not banned. Some times it happens that goog just drops your listing for a few days (Some times to a month) if its ben dropped it will be back in a month
would be interested to find solutions of same problem here. my educational website is under penality for unknown reasons its purely white hat -- but suddenly it has gone from first page to 5-6 of serp. sometime it totally disappears from index and cache is also removed by google. :x
I would try for a reinclusion request - lay out why you think there is a penalty and just make sure there are nothing outside of Google's guidelines. And plead for forgiveness - even if you have not done anything wrong. It has recently working for a site of mine. But it took about a year to get back in - never give up, never surrender !
Not a good idea until he figures out if he is banned. Send me your URL in a PM if you don't want to post it and I will take a look and see if I can come up with anything. Did you add anything to the site, do anything that might have caused it? Have you taken anything down? Have you been using alot of recip/3way links or other forms of discredited factors?
And as I mentioned, you must make sure that you are "clean" before submitting for reinclusion. There is a difference between a ban & a penalty. Banning is easy. If your site is not indexed at all and it is not a new site then yeah sure it can be a ban. A penalty can be much tougher to figure out unless you have owned the site since its inception. If you haven't, it takes a lot of research to figure it out and then you might be clueless of why Google has imposed a penalty on your site.
I think you got it backwards. The bans are the worst. Of course you know it but you have to worry about that mark on your reputation and google reinstating you. With a penalty all you have to do is find the problem and you can usually get everything back to normal.
Got what backwards? Anyway I think we are saying the same thing. I, Brian - did you take a look at the articles and what anchor text was used. Perhaps too optimized for the same anchor text can cause a penalty.
It's funny, but for all the times I read about penalties due to over-optimised anchors I cant help but think it hasn't done Bush or Blair any harm??
Check the server headers for that url, see if it causes a 302. Also see if you can find the page that url is posted on and check it out as well. I think there is some possibility that it could be a 302 hijack, though I doubt it. Google has been doing quite well with it of late...