well, this particular site is now finally getting indexed again, serps are still pretty wonky though!
I have had the exact same problem. My site went from a PR4 to a PR5 but went from ranking #1 for hundreds of keywords to ranking on Page 6 for those keywords. After a little research I believe I was hit with a "Minus 60 Penalty". This penalty drops your rankings to page 6 but still keeps your website indexed in Google. The penalty is for either on-site spamming or buying links. I believe it is because of buying links. I am going to get all of those links I just paid for removed, clean up my on-site optimization a little, and submit a re-inclusion request (in the Google Webmaster section) AFTER all the paid links have been removed and the site is cleaned up a bit.
That is bull, cause otherwise i'll buy links to a competitor site, tell Google about it, and he gets hit. Pure nonsense. If Google is taking this crap, is shameless.
I didn't bought any links, i don't sell them either; i didn't spam anyone, and frankly speaking it looks many people getting this absurd penalization for doing nothing beside updating their sites with unique and relevant content. Those that claim it's "over optimization" should read this and shut it. My penalized sites are 3 years old, trusted, full of unique and highly relevant content and i never bought/sold any kind of links. Shit, those sites get natural links cause they provide what they provide! Yet, I get penalized in several sites while at same time shitty mfa's and spam blogs get top rankings along with non-related sites? Joking with me or what?
Totally agree with this, if there is a penalize for buying links, I can easily bought links to my competitor's site and report it to Google, then all of them will be banned?
Well, I can confirm the page 6 penalty thing... Two of my (foreign) 2 sites scored consistantly for more than 2 years the top 5 spots for a number of highly competitive keywords. The 18th of november both sites got hit by a page 6 penalty (if one exists) and all keywords now fluctuate around page 6 of both sites... No spamming or whatever. I kept them totally clean because they were my main money making websites. Still waiting for them to return. Other sites have not been affected. See also this blog post: http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=38143 An interesting read on this issue. I have no idea why I was penalized, or how to get my top positions back again...
This is exactly why i am so furious with Google. It's their SE? Yes it is. Did they provided "guidelines" to webmasters? Yes they did. Did WE followed them? Yes we did. So why the penalties just to replace solid and relevant websites with non-relevant and spam sites? WHY?
hello I have a website that has the same penalty have tried everything to get out of it , without any success if any body knows a solution would love to know it
So many webmasters that followed Google Webmasters Guidelines GOT HIT by this penalty. My questions are: > Why those who follow Google guidelines got hit? > Why trusted and relevant websites got hit - while spam sites/ripped sites got major rankings? > Is Google team aware that because of this, lots of Whitehat Webmasters got disappointed with Google and are moving efforts to darker SEO areas?
If google attempted to get to your site and had an error more and likely they will drop you. I had an issue with google once where when i searched main domain the website was not showing. Later on it we noticed it was an DNS issue.
I changed servers with one of my sites and insatntly lost about half the traffic from G. Took me 3 months and loads of link building etc to get it back on the new server.
My rankings dropped on Jan 21st - pretty much before my very eyes. hundreds of keywords that have held 1st page positions for a long time are now languishing 40 to 60 postions (4 to 6 pages) down. One thing I have noticed that may or may not be a coincedence is dozens of spam sites linking to my pages. I am still unsure whether I have incurred a penalty or a victim of an algorithmic reorder. Its a bitter pill to swallow if a penalty is the cause as my affected site displays unique content and is updated reguarly.
Same stuff here but i didn't find any spam sites linking to me. And if i did, what the fuck do we care about that? Now i get competitors sites down linking spam sites to them? Don't believe it...
well, oddly, i have quite of bit of scrappers linking to me too, but that can't be the issue......seriously, what about the other 9 billion sites they link too? If that was the case, google would be full of spam sites dominating the search results (wait a minute, thats whats happening!) after getting the better sites penalized... what other things may have caused this on your site?
I honestly cannot think what may have been the cause The site in question is a wordpress install - it hasnt been over optimised. it has no sitewide outbounds (linking to wordpress etc or blogroll)) I havent gone out of my way to seek links from every ...add url... It has good content posted every 3 to 5 days - this seemed to rank the site on its own merit. For around 1 year it has been rock solid and very consistant and very stable for 2 years before that I have had some internal dupe problems with meta descriptions - but I wouldn't have these are serious enough to cop a penalty.... I may be wrong. As i say it may be a coincedence but there are dozens of links to my recent pages and most of these are broken - or redirects. maybe this a new tactic ... spam the hell of your competitor - then report to Google... if enough mud is thrown maybe some it sticks.
I did some research and Google has been playing with their algorithm and trying to run algorithms over the main algorithm. I despise Matt Cutts blog due to the useless information he continually posts but went and read none the less. Here are a couple screw ups Google has tried to implement and had backfire on them One is listed here http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/empty-review-sites/ and another is listed here http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/defuse-googlebomb/ Both Google experiments seem to have screwed over quite a few sites and it seems there may be a few casualties left out there. Hope it sheds some possible light....