Sites being heavily penalized by Google

With my site that was penalized, I can confidently say yes I should be #1 and yes I did earn it honestly. My ranking was earned because of our content and 6 years of reputation as a local resource, both online and offline. Current results show articles written in local media outlets about my business amongst the multiudes of blogs, pages, even our city's official visitors bureau mentions us. Our damn myspace page appears for the phrase "our publication name". That alone should suggest that my site is exactly what people are querying for.

What wasn't so honest was running co-ops ads on this site and pointing the weight to my other sites. My fault, I knew what I was doing. That said, I removed coop from my pages, and will have to grovel for some sort of penalty removal. This is not the coops fault, it's my own. That said, I can't find fault in the coop, it was a wonderful tool that I used to it's fullest, and I can't find fault in google for electing to penalize sites using it.

I've seen the posts from the "co-op purists" who insist that it is strictly an advertising tool. To me, thats like going to a head shop and purchasing a "water pipe for tobacco use only", when everyone knows what you are really going to be smoking, or escorts who say that "cash is exchanged for companionship only". Its just a technical safety disclaimer.

I'm curious, is there anyone who clearly labels coop links as advertisements on their site? If so, did you get nailed with a 30-40 drop?

 

I am curious if anyone has emailed google and had them confirm that their site has been penalized.

 

I submitted a reinclusion request yesterday for one of my smaller sites that was running coop with no ads pointed at it.

*IF* I get a response I'll post it.

I'm seeing a similar pattern expressed earlier in the thread - participating coop sites are penalized, sites recieving weight are fine.

 

Was your site dropped from the index or did you simply see it ranking lower than it had been?

AFAIK, re-inclusion is for sites that have been completely kicked out of the index.

 

On the 22nd, all keywords that I track (about 60 of them) experienced a 40-60 spot drop. Over the next few days 80% of them were not ranking in the top 1,000. Indexed pages from "site:" dropped about 75% and traffic fell by 90%.

Most of the referrals were long-tail searches to deep interrior pages which have all but disappeared.

I've used reinclusion requests on other sites in the past when there were problems (but no ban) and it worked fine.

 

And, the only linking to this site comes from the DP coop?

 

It's participating in the coop but has no weight pointed at it.

So, no there are no coop ads using this url.

 

But it has outgoing Coop links?

 

sorry, I didn't read your earlier post totally. My bad.

 

Yes that is correct. It is participating in the coop and has out-going links on it but no coop network ads are pointed at it.

 

Others in other threads here have seen the same thing and suggested that it is the outgoing links that are being penalized per se while perhaps incoming links are simply discounted rfe: PR value.

I'm not necessarily endorsing that hypothesis - just bringing it to your attention.

 

I meant after removing the coop links from the site. Obviously if you leave them up you're never going to get any kind of reprieval.

 

Hi there,

I am staggered by all this moaning about Google giving you guys a penalty. Using the co-op link system is simply trying to cheat the search engines into thinking you have more backlinks than you have put the effort into getting..

It is pure CHEATING!

If you think you were in the network to generate traffic, or some other pathetic reason, then you are only kidding yourself.

If you have received the penalty, it is deserved. There are sites out there, mine included that have put years on effort into getting into their ranking position.

Like the saying goes, if it was easy and worked, everyone would be doing it. If you took the risk, you now pay the penalty - literally.

 

Welcome to DP croc. I can't argue with you


H

 

fair enough for the people who have already generated heaps of backlinks thanks to the co op and got a high PR, I only had it on for about a week and my site is buried.

 

That's just silly. I'm sure you've worked really hard on your little site, but that doesn't mean that I haven't. Even if I haven't, that doesn't mean you 'deserve' something. Efficiency means getting more total output from the same level of input. On the web, efficiency = winning. I'm sorry I'm winning, but you are just whining.

That was a little rude, but you are being more than a little self-righteous.

 

Hi Matt, I thought you were on vacation?

 

Is it just me or there are other people whose site ISNT being panelized even if they use coop?

I am using it I have a site running Coop, and no weight pointed to it. its still being shown in SERP with the same old possition, but as asked before, I have marked the Coop links as 'advertisment' clearly..

 

Of course. Big Daddy was a huge update. More than one thing changed. And they are obviously continuing to make changes trying to fix the mess they made.

I don't think that's going to make a difference to Google, frankly.

 

I think it is a case of people having issues with people using the COOP to game the SERP's. Now I think that is fair enough as I would be very pissed off if a spam site went above mine just because it was in the COOP and mine was not because it was not in the COOP because I didn't want to take the risk. Last year I had a couple of sites in the COOP and Link-Vault (not my main site as I was just testing on a couple of other sites because of my concerns), but then dropped them when I started to see some seriously worry trends ( mass drops last October / November ). Thankfully I did - our main competitor sat at No1 for years using the COOP, he got a fully ban on Yahoo in 2004 when Yahoo targetted COOP sites, but he was still happy because he had got the Google results - then bam they went as well and he is still buried miles in the SERP's. I personally can't see him ever recovering from the full force of it and know his company had to lay off a load of staff because of it - including him

Lesson is live by the sword die by the sword, and don't moan about it when you do.