Hi there Question to webmasters... I submitted my Halloween site for ratings to WOT. Because I refused the requirement from one of their members to move the site on an SSL server I was victim of harrassement, treats and got a very bad rating. He rated the site as harmful! The site isn't harmful at all, there are no transactions done on it either, so the SSL certificate was not indispensable, and the site is just an info/affiliate one. I know that with Google giving favor to SSL sites nowadays... Strangely, the site received a manual penalty two/three days after the problem with the WOT member. It is now entirely deindexed! I asked Google for a review but know for a fact that they rarely reinstate deindexed sites. Strangely, all my other sites, built on the same pattern weren't flagged or penalized or deindexed. Actually I didn't ask for any kind of rating on Wot for those sites since the problem with the individual that seems to be dealing with personality troubles. It looks to me that the penalty could come from this specific individual or more... who knows? But given that other sites weren't hit, I don't know why Google would penalize one and not all of them built on the exact same pattern and shared on the same host. I've been thinking about buying a new domain name, a new webhost and move all the content on there. What do you think? Should I wait for the review or should I move my content on a fresh domain and host? Should I risk missing on the Halloween sales the site could get me and my associate? Thanks a bunch in advance for any input... I'm quite depressed with this mess.
Dunno why this was moved in SEO category as it's a Google matter... but anyways, I hope someone will lend a hand as I'm quite lost. Never had to face a penalty...
You can give it a try: Try to talk with the member who gave you bad rating and start building your trust with that guy to resolve this issue, if possible. Build some good profiles with quality content to dilute the results of bad rating website. Domain switch is really a last option to compensate with your previous hard work due to this negative review. Also you can discuss this issue in WOT Community too.
Thanks for taking the time to read and answer Talking with the member is a waste of time, as long as I don't want to buy an SSL certificate and move my site on a dedicated IP he won't change his mind and given the bad rating and the report to Google I personally don't want to talk to this person any more. I always built good content on the site - now I'm ready to start building pages without a single affiliate link on them. Wanna thank this stupid superhero for he bad he does to my Halloween payout. Suffered from my Squidoo earning loss now this... Then I thought of buying new domain but also new webhost and leave the former site as it is until domain renewal. Only build the new site with fresh content, fresh photos, fresh layout, etc. It might work. Lastly the WOT community is divided: those that had to face the same troubles as me from the very same superhero member, those that consider themselves as the Internet police although WOT has already been sued for such practices, but nothing changed...
Then they should have deindexed all my sites that are all built on the same pattern... Might come though. But I don't allow Google to decide what is low quality and what's not. Especially when I see a bunch of spam sites ranked higher than mine. All with scraped content from all platforms like HubPages, Wizzley and others.
OK Google reviewed my site, got a reply: manual penalty revoked. This leads me in believing that external fingers and minds gathered to report my site.
Google do impose penalties or deindexing on websites that break their guidelines. Consider any recent changes to the site. If they could possibly have an effect, try reversing them. Analyse robots.txt files carefully.
Removed all nocive backlinks even some from low ranked article directories, removed all errors they reported of which I wasn't aware. Couldn't address some of the errors because they aren't offered in WordPress - as I use WP - no changes on the site, only change was submitting for review to WOT and deindexed as soon as I got the argument with the member that rates all sites as bad as possible. Only things that changed a bit are: my associate doesn't add tags to posts and we post every day for a month. Nothing to say about robot.txt apart from normal disallow...
Actually Google Penalty is the negative impact on a websites search rankings based on updates to manual review. The penalty can be an unfortunate by product of an algorithm update or an international penalization for various black hat SEO techniques.