Sites being heavily penalized by Google

Hey guys maiby the problem is not getting penalizated because of COOP. Maiby that you got links from COOP , and now google don't care of them... to much. maiby google had some soime of your links because of the DP COOP into some kind of cache pages, and now it just refreshed thoses and didn't found the new links anymore...

 

Let me try to translate what 'softgroups' is trying to say in broken english.

Pretty much as I was saying its not technically the COOP that is causing our penalization but one or more links to sites that were on the COOP which Google has just deemed shady or which have become blacklisted. From the records I've been gathering along with other information it does seem to co-incide with time of cache. Sites that have been cached recently before the 23rd of June are the ones affected by this. Sites that have not been cached for almost a month and were due for a new cache have not been affected. One site of mine was just cached on the 23rd and its the same exactly site as one that was penalized only a different domain name I was using. Now its been given the #1 rank that my penalized domain name had.

In addition to what our silly speaking friend was saying:

I know that google normally knows when theres multiple domains pointing to the same site but for some reason the penalty didn't occur to my other domain and now Google thinks its a completely seperate website as my penalized one however it has the same status as my penalized website used to have. It sucks because the domain name doesnt match my site but I'll take what I can get and I've changed all of my internal links to that of the newly ranked domain name.

So my suggestion is if you had any other domain names pointing to your once decently ranked sites I would check to see if they've been penalized and if not use that as your new leading domain name (at least temporarily) and change all of your links on your site to reflect this new domain name. You can check to see if they've been penalized by searching for your domain name on google without the ".com". For instance if your domain is "howardtheduck.com" just search google for "howardtheduck" without spaces. If you do not see your site at the top as it probably should be this domain has most likely been penalized. However if you also had the domain "howardduck.com" but never really used it before and you find that its not penalized change everything to match this domain and google should pick it up and even give it the same status that your penalized domain had.

My theory is that the next time your penalized website is cached again you may see some reprieval on the penalty. If not then this means its probably not an automated penalty based on outgoing links but rather something that has been affixed directly to your website. This doesn't mean its permanent but it could mean a 6mo - 1yr period before you see decent ranks. I am almost 100% certain that the penalty has nothing to do with incoming links to your website but rather only outgoing links. My biggest sites didnt have any incoming links from the coop because I didnt need them. I was using my big sites' weight to assist my smaller newer websites yet my big websites got penalized just the same.

Hope this gives some clarity to the matter for some of you.
Oh and also TOLD YOU SO.

 

Funny we haven't heard from fryman in a while on this thread LOL

 

That is exactly what I had going on, using my big site to push weight to smaller ones.

 

I was using the same method, but eventually the balance of perceived loss incurred to your big site in order to bolster your little sites may outweigh the benefits gained. I'm starting to really question if it's worth the loss in ranks to have the co-op stay on the big sites... which leads me to another topic I'm thinking of writing about.

 

Tee Hee

 

No, it's not. But my baby has been around for years, loads of unique content, dedicated user base, I just hope my loss of positioning for my own damn business name is a temporary thing, like being put in time out or something.

Lesson learned, don't play loose with the sites that matter.

 

Yes I agree =/

 

The exact cause of any penalty is difficult to determine.

This is clearly not your normal SERP fluctations. See the pretty JPEG attached to this message.

It does appear that outbound co-op links are the prime suspect in this issue.

 

I agree.

I only suffered a drop in the sites hosting the co-op links. The sites I used as destination are ranking well.

 

Thanks will to make clear.Same thing happened to my site www.katrina-kaif.net.Site was in top 7 in google for katrina kaif keyword.But when i add this site to coop ad the links in yahoo increased but ranking decreased to 11th place know.Same thing happened to my other sites also.I was thinking the same reason as you said but was not clear.But i removed the coop now

 

I'd have to concur - now all 4 of my sites with Coop on are nowhere, this seems to be happening now and ongoing. Last night, two were out of the top serps by a long way, and two were in. This morning the other two have now dropped off the radar. All other non-coop sites are fine.

What's really pissing me off about this, if it transpires to be the case is Google's double standards. It's penalizing webmasters for selling adspace (not even selling it, giving it away!) The fact that an free advertising link can affect the target site's rankings so much is Google's fault and fixable their end - it's a weakness in their system, not in webmasters wanting to make the most of their sites.

What is the message here - links are bad? They don't mind putting links on your page when they're adwords paid - it's disgraceful. What with this and the nofollow nonsense, google are losing a lot of support from webmasters. There is nothing wrong with selling adspace on your site. Nothing. If Google can't cope with it, they need to take a long hard look at what they're doing to filter it from their SERPs.

This is of course if this turns out to be what the problem is, I'm increasingly thinking it is. I hope to be proved wrong and made to eat my words, but if they are penalizing the coop then it just highlights their weaknesses, not the coop's.

 

I think if the Coop were used to rotate ad banners one or two at a time you might find a different result. The truth is that the majority of people using Coop or LinkVault are using 5 small text links as a site-wide footer that most human visitors are not even going to see. It's not that difficult to identify sites doing that and recognize why they're doing it.

It's not that the advertising benefit is zero. It's that previously the PR benefit was clearly greater than the advertising benefit. Now Google is trying to nullify the PR benefit. I expect they have already done that for their own AdSense ads.

 

I have always seen Coop traffic, so personally that's more important - I know they're tucked away at the bottom on many, but people do hit them, and as it's 'free' traffic, I've never worried about it.

Google shoud be able to see that bank of ads and ignore it I can't see how penalizing sites with good content is a just reward. I'm not ignorant to the PR benefits - but nullifying it by penalizing is just wrong, if that in fact turns out to be the case.

I'm holding off taking Coop off until I see clarification from them.

 

When I was in the Coop I too saw some traffic from those ads. I don't think people should discount that. The problem is that historically, the advertising factor has been mixed in with the PR factor - that's what seems to be changing.

Perhaps that's exactly what is happening. We need to be specific about the word "penalizing".

I just posted this in another thread:

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showpost.php?p=1044405&postcount=205

 

That's fine, I have no issue with that, and would indeed applaud that, were it not that a site that's been running them for a few weeks and had a top 10 keyword ranking for a year has suddenly disappeared into the nether regions. The site has never had a coop ad pointed at it either and was as far as I'm concerned, well within Google's webmaster's guidelines.

 

Yes, but remember that Big Daddy was a very complex (and flawed!) update and that many sites that have never even heard of the Coop or LinkVault or similar schemes have also tanked.

Haven't you heard? Google really IS broken this time.

 

I am seeing pages of mine that hosted co-op links listed at the end of a certain search. All of the previous results are scrappers with my own content.

And today, a site:domain.com is showing 15,000 results. Last week were 400,000.

Google is listing the results 30 or 40 positions after it used to did and is starting to deindex the whole site.

It is important to observe that currently the penalty is only applying to the site that run the ads, not the ones with the ads pointing to.

 

Considering whats been said in the last 10 posts or so Im thinking then that this punishment would be more temporary perhaps a month or so. Its obvious we've been given some sort of smack on the hands for doing this because at least we still show up on the search results. But as automated as it was that we were given this bad mark I hope its just as automated to be removed as soon as they see we've cleared the coop links.

 

I disagree. Few will argue that Google has declared war on artificial linking schemes. This is but one battle in the war. I got to a point where I simply flatlined (no traffic from Google). This has been going on for 6 months. My thinking was the same as yours in that it will come back. Last week I got tired of waiting for a magic moment and REMOVED ALL LV links. At this point I have nothing to lose, it's already a dead website. I think many webmasters will eventually reach the same conclusion...it ain't working anymore or worst, paying a penalty.

Sitting back and thinking about all the comments I have read around linking, I have concluded that it's not a good long term practice. Moreover, that Google IS sticking to their guns.

Someone on DP posted a very good point. If Google asked you if you thought you should be #1 what would be your reply? Have you earned it honestly? Having digested that myself I have to say LV or DP probably isn't an honest way to climb the ranks.

There was a time when I used to swear by this network and the net results. Now I find ALL networks have the same doom and gloom conversations. Far too many to think that it's going to, one day, go away.


H