My high traffic site, was recently penalized by google. i got a notification that they detected unnatural links and asked me to remove any links that pass pagerank. i own a press release website, where people post news releases. My site lost significant traffic since past one week or so and ranking poorly in google. Because of this adsense revenue dropped significantly as well. I am at a loss here 1. My site ranks poorly in google web results and doesnt show up. 2. News content arent being picked up by google news. 3. Lost significant traffic. 4. Site PR is 0, previously it was PR4. The only good news is - google hasnt entirely de-indexed my site yet, my website pages are not showing up in google in top results, which i highly suspect of penalty. All the fresh site content are getting indexed without any problems. After careful research, i have 5-6 advertiser links (some directories) are listed in my homepage and till now, i havent used nofollow at all. I admit that i was selling paid links, and there are one or two footer links, totally unrelated to my site content. Besides this some of content in my website is pointing to affiliate links. What could be the problem? How do i fix it? The remedies i did was... 1. used rel=nofollow in all advertiser and footer links. 2. Used nofollow in those pointing to affiliate links. 3. Cleaned up some of the spammy tags with links, which users abused. 4. Removed all social icons, and my site loads very fast. These are the only ones, i could think of and i asked google for re-inclusion request and told them nofollow was added. Please help! Any help is so much appreciated!!!
one thing with google is don't allow them screw your site. to avoid this i always have as many sites as i can for a particular niche so that if they screw one site i don't feel bad. so far I've never heard the story of someone who has restored their page rank after being penalized by google now that Google have told you to remove unnatural links, even if you remove the links and rectify all other problems it's hardly possible they get back your page rank which you loose. i think you have to optimize your site again
Unfortunately, I totally agree with this. A few years ago, I got an e-mail from AdSense saying something similiar. I had no idea where the traffic was coming from at first that Google had issues with. So I wrote an e-mail back asking them which links/traffic sources were the problem. I'd be glad to remove them. Google wrote back saying they could not tell me that information. So my thought is, you expect me to correct a problem and you won't even tell me what the problem is? This was in an entirely different niche. WritingSolution also provided some excellent advice: "i always have as many sites as i can for a particular niche"
I also suffered through, mine PR went down to 1 and site lost from google search engine, and even writing the name of site wasnt showing anywhere in 1st 4, 5 pages. it was isolated. I thought that everything is gone. later I made all links nofollow, changed the theme, made it simpler for crawling. kept updating it daily for 3, 4 times. and later it got its visibility on google back, and now I've started getting traffic from google and its growing day by day. now Im hoping that I will get my PR back. the steps you've taken are positive, maybe your should just wait for few months as I waited for 2 months, I know its frustrating but unfortunately wait is the only thing you can do.
i never thought that google is coming so hard on links that pass PR and against paid links. I have been running my site since 2005 and it seems we have to comply with 2011 rules.
Here is what i did: 1. I used rel="nofollow" in all the paid advertiser links, so that no PR is passed. 2. Removed all the footer ads. 3. Cleaned up all tags, which looked spammy and abused by users. 4. Improved the speed of site (removed all social icons which slowed my site) 5. Used no follow on affiliate links. 6. Submitted for reconsideration. Google made me comply with 2011 rules against paid links, which passed PR and i complied. I was running my site since 2006. These are the things i did and i already lost over 50% traffic and am losing adsense income, because of drop in traffic. I compromised the quality of site and now paying a hefty price for it.
Google denied us the reinclusion request and really dont know what the problem is. I am suspecting that google is clamping down on selling paid links and to comply with them, i am making all paid links nofollow. Seems there is no choice.