Notice: This thread is not about PR I opened a thread about a statement made by a very popular person from Google and it seems has been removed. If I made something wrong (maybe by mentioning his name), please advise me. I simply wanted to create a discussion and maybe find what kind of penalties have been lifted, so here's the quote: "I’m expecting that also in the next few days that we’ll be expiring some older penalties on websites." Can't find any more info apart from the above statement. Did anyone have a penalized website and noticed a drastic increase in rankings these last couple days? I wonder what exactly all this means.
i dont think that by mentioning the name you would get penalized, it would be a 1st amendment right....
Heh, you don't get first amendment rights on a forum. A forum master gets to rule like a dictator on his own forums. I've had some dramatic increases in specific key word serps, but not a site overall.
google can probably penalize whatever it wants with respect to appearing in its organic search results without running afoul of the 1st amendment. They aren't interfering w/ your free speech if they remove something posted on one of their sites either. But if they hacked into another site to remove something you wrote, that would be a lot more serious than the 1st amendment!
i think it was the PR aspect of the post (that has been discussed constantly and tediously) here for the last 48 hours solid that probably got it removed.
I did not mention PR at all, and infact it's not about PR. I just wrote a simple post as the 1st one here, trying to figure out what 'old penalties' could have expired. Some insight will be appreciated and thanks all for your comments.
The statement was made by MattCutts in his blog. I think it simply means that Google will remove the penalties on different sites in the next few days. Good news for all people who have there sites penalized in the past.
The moderators here are merging the PR related threads because it's ridiculous to have hundreds of them in this folder. We don't need another one to discuss what Cutts said... who cares ??
Bryce, this thread is not about PR We're the discussing the issue about penalized websites. I always thought that after filing a reinclusion request, you can have your site back in the index (or ranking back to normal) if it's clear of all offending practices. It seems though, that this is not the case and we all have to wait for Google's own timings.
it is so hard to tell how much a site may be penalized without knowing more about the algorithm many of us suspect some kind of partial penalty, when new sites are ranking higher or getting pr over an older site that has backlinks that doesn't even know what or if it did anything wrong to incur a penalty (many are innocently caught up in some part of the algorithm that mistakenly labels them as growing too fast or getting too many links too fast or damaged by blackhat linking to them that they had no control over, etc....)
canam is correct here. Google is not divulging any real information about what the penalties are, how they are incurred or a remedy to them. I sugget asking Matt Cutts directly on his blog because he seems to be the only person in the universe who has the information you're seeking.
Hmm many SEO pros say that incoming links can't hurt you, since if that was the case, competitors can harm each other very easily. I would have thought any spammy incoming links would be discounted at most. If I had to ask a "simple" question: Did any of you ever had a website which was penalized, filed a reinclusion request and was back to normal in couple days, weeks or months? Maybe Google is releasing websites from "jail" only now? But why now?
Thanks Bryce for your reply, but many people are asking same questions on his blog and he's avoiding answering them. I thought some people who might have had their website ranking again, might shed more light on this matter. Another quote from same post "I figured the SEO industry could use something to discuss" And we're discussing now on his request
As Matt Cutts said penalized sites may be back in the game soon. Personally I don't think Google will remove the old penalties from websites in masses...
worse scenario I can think of is when some spammers pick up on your site to use in their links to add to their spamming to somehow hide their links amongst them....... I have seen that often, and if your site somehow gets more of their spamlinks linking to you that outnumbers the legit links that you have, I really believe that google will unfairly punish your site and the punishment seems to persist that might be a good tactic for the blackhatters to pick up on, if you put a competitors site link in with a bunch of bad neighborhood spam links and then spam the whole list of links all over the place, it seems to me that the legit site is at a big risk of some kind of penalty if the spam links start to outnumber their legit links (and probably a smaller site with less legit links is really at risk I think) I hope that the above is wrong and that what I have observed was just a coincidence, but it sure seems like the above is what is happening out there
What I don't understand ... a penalty is a penalty ... or do they expire now as well? Also, if a website was penalized and cleaned their act, they had to wait for days, weeks, months, years ... until Google made up their minds?
Google is like women, they change their decisions every day, and you don't know what they'll do next day.