Sites being heavily penalized by Google

Hi guys, I'm experiencing the same problem as digital583, I've consistently been ranked highly (1-5) for certain keywords over the last 5 years. In the last 24 hours this has plummetted to 40 or so which has never happened before. Not sure what's going but but this will no doubt affect visitors coming to my website I've dropped the co-op for now.

 

If you haven't read what Matt Cutts has said, then it is worth reading: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/indexing-timeline/. The thread gives examples of some sites which have been penilised and why. If you believe what googles webmaster embassador says, then I believe that the penalities are being caused by non relevant links (and links to spammy poor sites), on a sites pages. Therefore in the case of the COOP it is not would not explicetly be the COOP that would cause the problem, but the links that the COOP would place on your site. Therefore it is probably a consequence of what the COOP does not a direct connection to the COOP - i.e. if you placed exactly the same links as the COOP does by a manual process, rather than via the automated system, you may end up with the same penalty. By this means google could target all link networks in one hit ( hence the similar problems being seen over at link-vault.com ). Saying that google also states in its webmaster guidelines that you should not take part in any link network programmes, which both LV and COOP are, so they could well be penilising this as well.

There are a lot of arguments for and against as to whether networks such as LV and COOP, are being targetted, but I would say that given googles noises about targetting link networks, and the fact this has coincided with lots of LV and COOP sites seemingly being penilised, that they have started to practice what they preach and come down hard on link networks.

If you search for http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=coop+digitalpoint.com&meta= a proxy site of the COOP page comes up top for me, followed by the digital point forum section. You would certainly expect the actual main dp COOP page to come top if there where no penality being applied to that page.

Even worse over at link vault - search for http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=link+vault and I can't find the link vault site in the first 5 pages.

Maybe its just a coincidence - but you can only take coincidences so far before you start thinking 2+2=4.

 

Well, 24 hours after saying Co-op has nothing to do with the penalty, my two sites showing co-op links were hit with the 30~40 positions fall. Even if I search for the domain name without the .com.

I will remove the co-op from one of the sites to see if there are changes.

 

If its a penalty don't expect it to be immediately removed. If you can't get your results back after a week or so it may be worth putting in a reinclusion request.

There has been discussed about possible penalities applied to LV and COOP here: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=95507

 

fryman is always sucks, like he is good in everything on earth

 

I bet theres a lot of people out there wondering why their ranking has gone south, and will never know its because of the co op.

 

How do you do it?

 

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/reinclusion-request-howto

 

Thanks. I will wait for two weeks, though.

 

Seems to be a pattern here..?

Anybody actually got hit with this penalty that does not have co-op ads?

 

It seems to be a big pattern across sites which are in link networks not just the COOP - a lot of LV users are seeing the same thing: http://forum.link-vault.com/viewtopic.php?t=2853

 

I got nailed as well and I removed it over a month ago.

After that many pages that were deindexed came back but SERPS plummeted a couple days ago in terms I ranked top 5 for 6 months.

 

Well you have to realise that google also monitors link churn for websites - i.e the speed at which you gain and loose links. So when you join a link network you probably hit a spam filter if you gain links to fast - and a further filter when you leave a link network and loose links fast. There has been a lot of talk about google having set penalty period, so you may come out of a penalty after a set amount of time - depending on how serious google deems you attempted to manipulate the results. I guess this would be like the sandbox where your site is hidden in the depths of the results for a period then suddenly you appear in the results - maybe and I would not be suprised - the sandbox and penalty periods etc are all one and the same thing.

 

Check the Google forum here on DP. There are plenty of people complaining about Google these days. Personally I do not think the main problems people are having with Google are related to link networks.

Spam websites with 5 billion pages reported comes to mind. "Bad data push"...

 

Well I would agree but I never gained that many backlinks and haven't really lost that many as well. When I joined my weight was small and when I left my weight was small simply because of the supplemental problem. I did at one point gain a lot of weight but then subsequently limited the amount I used for fear of tripping the filter. I used the COOP for about 3 months total.

The results I have seen seems to be happening to a lot of people regardless of how many links and/or weight they have.

I also think that the 5 billion spam pages has something to do with this. You can't just add 5 billions pages then remove them without having some sort of consequence to other sites. I would receive daily google alerts when the spam sites were linking to my site (and then I would report them).

Basically the spammer was caught and banned, my pages started to comeback all last week, then 3 days ago SERPS took a dive and for the past day I now am being deindexed again. Its frustrating but its my own fault for participating in something that easily could be penalized when they got around to it. I just hope things return to normal (is there such a thing?). Its been a month since I've had it off the site but the cache supposedly is 30 days. At this point, who knows. There are to many variables to keep track of.

 

FWIW according to MCutts and the spam site owner there were only around 10k actual pages. As to why Google was listing so many pages for the site and returning so many search results for it no one know or is telling. But it seems clear that something is quite wrong with Google and its results one way or another.

 

I don't beleive a word they say.

Before they went public you had some sort of confidence in what they say.

Now its the complete opposite. From 5 billion to 10k?

If his alexa ranking jumped that high from 10k pages then I should be number 1 because they indexed 5x that for my site last week.

Complete BS in my opinion. Bad data push....more like bad public relations.

 

I would normally agree with you, however it seems that the spam site owner confirmed it and proved that he was in fact the spam site owner (by posting a hello DP page on the site). It is in the Google forum in the huge "spam site 5 bill..." thread.

As to the Alexa rating, that site was getting multiple page 1 listing on Google for a wide variety of terms...

Not saying that both Google and the site owner were not lying but it seem like an unusual intersection of info from both sides at least.

 

Yeah, a spammer embarrasses Google, pisses off a host of webmasters and they are telling the truth.

So is it a glitch or bad data push that causes the number of indexed pages to be mutiplied by 500,000?

I can't wait until the glitch hits my site. I'll have 200 billion pages indexed then. Then I'll retire

 

I retract my previous post, certain sites which were ranked high are showing a big 30-40 position drop. Not only this, strangely their allinanchor results are also showing the 30-40 position drop. Very interesting to see how this turns out.