Hey all, I have run into a very weird problem that I cannot resolve myself for some reason. I am fairly well experienced in SEO and know at least some stuff about Google penalties, but I simply cannot explain what is going on. Therefore I am hoping that maybe someone that is experienced in this could give me a pointer or two. Below I am providing a detailed description of the issue. Subject: a 2 year old website. Valid PR5 for over a year. Site sections: the site consists of several sections and subdomains: - a Wordpress blog running on frontpage of the site (www.) - A forum running on vBulletin located at forum. subdomain. - Topsite running on Aardvark located at topsite. subdomain. - Wallpapers serving script located at wallpapers. subdomain. Problem: As of about 6 months ago we started losing MASSIVE traffic, probably a 60% decrease while the site's PR remained the same. The weird part? It affected only the Wordpress blog = www. section of the site. So I've done some checking into it -- googled for "EXACT names of articles" posted in our blog, and realized that they're either in supplemental results or ranked so low that no one can see them (usually as one of the last results), while before they were always the #1 result. Oh, and why am I mentioning resultS in plural when I've done searches for "exact article names" is because a lot of scraper sites steal our blog's feed.... and those scraper sites' pages are now ranked way higher than us, the original source. ...at the same time, everything that is located at other site sections (= subdomains) is not affected by this google penalty... so if I am searching for a name of a post from forums or a name of a hosted wallpaper it's still where it is supposed to be, usually #1 SERP. So, an overview of the above: The google penalty did not influence PR, only SERP. It only influenced the www. section of the site powered by Wordpress, and not any of the subdomains. The result is that our articles are last in search or in supplemental results while spam blogs that steal our RSS (or even sites that simply show our headlines and provide links to our articles) are ranked as #1, #2, #3, etc.... basically higher than us. Important note: No structural changes were done to the blog = all sections, URL's, etc... remained the same since it was launched (and when it had great SERP's). Potential problems and what I did to fix this: 1) Immediately I thought that the problem could be due to the fact that someone hacked our site around 8 months ago (so 2 months before the penalty kicked in) and managed to create some spam pages with links to porn, casino, etc. However, this issue was successfully resolved over 5 months ago and nothing of that sort has reappeared. 2) We've been using Translator Pro plugin for Wordpress, which is an automated tool that translates pages into other languages. The problem is that one of the translation engines it uses is Google's Translate which as I found out upon research is a violation of webmaster guidelines. So, I've removed it around the same time the penalty kicked in (maybe 5.5 months ago)... and even switched the site's IP address just in case the old one got blacklisted. 3) Another potential problem was that we've been using older version of Wordpress at the time when the penalty kicked in (which is probably why the site got hacked). Right after that I've upgraded to the latest version of Wordpress and since then we always get the latest version as soon as it comes out. 4) So, yes, I've got to admit, we've been using text-link-ads.com and its Wordpress plugin to generate some extra revenue. We did not remove this "completely", however I've manually modified the plugin to add rel="nofollow" for each link. That was about 3 months ago. I've also added rel="nofollow" to all clickbank affiliate links we've got on our site, further rerouting them through links. subdomain via .htaccess since I read that affiliate links can also cause penalties. 5) Going back to the scraper sites issue that use our site's RSS feed, I've done some modifications to the RSS feed: as of 4 months ago it does not show the full articles, but rather only the beginning of each article followed by a copyright notice... As such --I believe-- it could not be a duplicate content penalty. Resume: So, basically.... After correcting the issues above I've went through Google's webmaster guidelines and can genuinely say that nothing is wrong with the site at the moment, at least from how I understand the guidelines. Then I've sent Google a reinclusion request so they would remove this weird penalty (that once again, affects only the www. part of the site powered by Wordpress) --explaining to them exactly what I think could have caused the penalty and what was done to resolve it-- , but I've never heard back from them and the penalty still remains. That was 2 months ago or so. So.... if anyone has bothered reading all this and could give me some advice... I would really appreciate it. If you'd like to get the URL of the site to take a look at it for yourself, please PM me or leave a message here. P.S. I'll also put my money where my mouth is -- if anyone here will be able to help me resolve this issue, I will paypal you $100 if and when it is resolved. If there will be multiple people suggesting the same thing, the first one to suggest it will get it.