To all webmasters, its time to wake up. Google has been coming on harshly on webmasters and sending them warning notice for sites selling links.
If you are selling paid links or linking to bad neighbourhood, or if somebody reported you, Google might impose a manual penalty and if that happens, you will see a significant drop in traffic and your site will rank poor on all search results.
- The bad news is once Google imposes you a penalty (manual or algorithmic one), then chances to recover may take months. Unfortunately google does not tell you the reason why you have been penalized.
- The good news is you can submit a reconsideration request to google, and Google will review your site and you will get a decision within 1-2 weeks.
I recently received this penalty on one of my sites and somehow after 4 reconsideration requests, mine was accepted and i should say i was quite lucky.
This is the warning i received from webmasters central…
Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.xxxxxxx.com/,
We’ve detected that some of your site’s pages may be using techniques that are outside Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links on your site pointing to other sites that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include selling links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.
We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you’ve made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google’s search results.
If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team
How to recover from penalty?
1. First of all, dont panic, think and analyze whats wrong with your site. First check whether your site fresh content is indexed by google. Use site:example.com in Google or use webmaster tools to identify the issue. It could be your site is indexed, but may disappear in search results, because of the imposed penalty.
2. When you submit a reconsideration request, be sure to mention A to Z on what you did on your site to lift the penalty. You have to explain everything on your reconsideration request. For example nofollow on paid links, removing links participating in link exchange, removing blogroll links, eliminating duplicate content.
3. Participate in Google webmaster central form and ask for help. Chances are there that a Google engineer may review at your site.
4. Understand that penalty imposed by Google are of 2 types: Manual one or Algorithmic one. If you are penalized by algorithms, then submitting reconsideration request for manual lift will be of no use. But if you are imposed manual penalty, certainly submitting a reconsideration request for manual review will break the penalty and get you back in Google. Manual penalty usually have expiry (see matt cutts videos) , but you will never know.
If you did everything right, and your manual penalty might be revoked, you will likely get a message like this…
Reconsideration request for http://www.xxxxxx.com/: Manual spam action revoked November 7, 2011
Dear site owner or webmaster of http://xxxxxxxxxx,
We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://xxxxxxxxx/ for compliance with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Previously the webspam team had taken manual action on your site because we believed it violated our quality guidelines. After reviewing your reconsideration request, we have revoked this manual action. It may take some time before our indexing and ranking systems are updated to reflect the new status of your site.
Of course, there may be other issues with your site that could affect its ranking without a manual action by the webspam team. Google’s computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users. If your site continues to have trouble in our search results, please see this article for help with diagnosing the issue.
Thank you for helping us to maintain the quality of our search results.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team
It is really a heartbreaking to see penalties and desperate times need desperate help and i am sure my post above will be of great help to any webmaster in bad times.
