5 replies to this topic

[darciusrex]

Hi everybody!

I wonder if there's been much research on the subject of what exactly gets kicked, the entire website or just the "guilty" page, when you have a single page that has spammy content? The company I write for has a clean homepage, but has a few older pages that we're treating for spam. If we miss a page, I hope only the page gets kicked and not the whole site :doh: Anybody had any experiences with "the punishment"? Yeah, I know the question is a bit naive, but as I said in a different post, I'm new to this stuff.

[denver]

I have a client with a similar problem: they have a "Products" page that re-iterates a lot of the information on their Home page, only in slightly more detail. The Home page is fine, but Google ranks the Products page 0/10.

It seems to be because of duplicate content being seen as spam; we can't find any other nasties on the page.
But we worry that it was just dumb luck it didn't happen the other way around and get the Home page slam-dunked.
We worry that we don't know when that might change.

We have a project underway to rationalise some things on the site, that will also address this issue and hopefully make it go away, but that's the problem for all of us, isn't it? - it's all speculate, guess, experiment, hope, and pray!

It's a rough way to run a business.

I understand Googles reluctance to expose their Intellecual Property to their competitors, but perhaps they could offer some additional clues, particularly around the area of the penalties they apply?

I mean, what an opportunity for them!! Sell an "Analyse This!" service to web-masters and SEO consultants, that highlights "problem areas" on the website before it goes live . . . . . .

Interested in all your thoughts.

[Alan Perkins]

It's impossible to say how the penalty will be applied, and the extent of it. Even if there was some consistency to it in the past, things are changing a lot right now(apparently) so the future could be completely different.

I've no direct experience of being penalised. Maybe those who have can chip in.

Originally posted by denver
I have a client with a similar problem: they have a "Products" page that re-iterates a lot of the information on their Home page, only in slightly more detail. The Home page is fine, but Google ranks the Products page 0/10.

There are all sorts of reasons that may have happened - broken toolbar, deeply buried page, page not indexed, checking the wrong URL. It may not be a penalty at all.

[Matt B]

From working with some penalized sites, there have been some consistent paterns. However, all that seems to be changing lately, so this may just be useless trivial knowledge at this point.

Typically the offending page may be droppped out of the index, which may not be easily seen in a large site. Homepages with spammy content tend to stick around, however pages on the rest of the site get dropped from onth to month, until only the homepage is left. Eventually, the company may not even be found on a search by name, just by search by url, then possibly dropped completely.

Most times, however, what people mistake as a penalty or a ban turns out to be a problem in the code or dynamic content indexing issues. So it's best not to panic, but to research as much as you can.

Disclaimer
This is by no means a definitive explanation, it's only what I've observed from working with other people's sites that have been penalized. Because of the fluxuations in Google lately, I would not advise anyone to use this as a measurement of penalty or something to get upset about. Like I said, it's only a typical pattern from what I've observed in the past.

[Jill]

Most times, however, what people mistake as a penalty or a ban turns out to be a problem in the code or dynamic content indexing issues.  So it's best not to panic, but to research as much as you can.

This is extremely important to note.

Most of the time there are NO penalties on a site. I dare say that at least 95% of the time when someone thinks their site is penalized, it's not. It's either just not optimized well, or there is a technical reason why the search engines can't categorize the site properly.

If you have not done anything to purposely trick the search engines, really and truly not, you won't be penalized.

Doesn't mean you may not have some technical difficulties to overcome, but that's not a penalty.

Jill

[denver]

Hi. Just thought it might be of interest:

Without any changes whatsoever, the pages I mentioned ALL have a PR of 6 now, while the backlinks shown by the toolbar have declined dramatically (about 50%).

So, who knows? I guess that's my major (only) beef with Google; they're so deliberately inscrutable.

(There also appears to be some anomaly with the 2.095 toolbar with regard to backlinks syntax. It seems to arbitrarily insist on a space between the "links:" part of the term and the URL, and then sometimes it works without the space. If anyone has any clues about that I'd be interested in hearing them.)

Kindest