3 replies to this topic

[reddevil]

GOOGLE PENALTY
Have I been penalized?
I cringe when I write this coz I know from hanging around in WW that I have made lots of elementary errors in my webbuilding but I hope that somebody can point me in the right direction to rectify things? I am just an innocent webmaster trying to get a few referrals here and there.


SCENARIO IN DECEMBER 2003
My site used to be PR2.
It had two incoming PR5 links (not related to my business) which were shown as links in Google, and about 4 other links that were below PR4.
I used to get referrals from Google on a number of my pages.
Google had indexed about 10 of my pages.
As I was new to webuilding, I had my site listed on two link farms (although I cannot remember their website address).


WHAT HAPPENED SINCE?
The two PR5 links have disappeared because the site went out of business.
I have started a link campaign and have attracted about 10 links (including two PR5 links) but these do not show yet because Google hasn't crawled since December (not even during Brandy).
During my development, I have renamed some pages but have not 'removed' them from Google (but Google hasn't crawled since and I have not had any 400 errors).
I modified the content of my pages slightly.


SCENARIO SINCE JANUARY 2004
My site has fallen to a white bar PR0.
Google does not show any backlinks (probably because they are below PR4).
I get no referrals from Google (or any other SE) because my site has dropped so low in the rankings.
Google only shows my Homepage as being indexed.


WHAT SHOULD I DO NOW?
How would I know if I have been penalized? Should I e-mail Google to ask them?
Why has Googlebot not crawled during Brandy - does it crawl PR0 sites or sites that have been penalized?
Should I resubmit to Google or do I need to rectify things first?
Will Google penalize me for having the link farm entries? If so, how am I supposed to remove them (they are only one-way inward links)?
Do I have to 'remove' the deleted pages?

[OldWelshGuy]

HI Red Devil, welcome

You say you have done some bad things, like what?

The most likely is that your pages have gone because you renamed them and google couldn't find them (did you get ANY page not found errors) if it couldn't find them it would drop those pages from its index. If the only incoming links you had went down, then your reason to be spidered would also go down and with no backlinks of any kind you would warrant a PR0.

Are there any other links pointing to your site? Google does not like to spider pages on a site that is not linked to.

I would say that a penalty could be in place, but normally you would have a greyed out toolbar rather than PR0.

With regard the incoming link farm links, provided you don't have link farm pages on your site then it will not matter (or shouldn't) did you ever have a link farm page on your site?

If you have set up some links, then wait until they get updated, google should then come back, and things should start moving up again.

If not then a mail to help@google might be in order

HTH

OWG

[reddevil]

OWG,
Thanks for the Welcome!
I thought I had been penalized coz some of my previously listed pages were in my Root directory and I had not renamed them at all, but now they are not indexed by G. I wondered if I should resubmit again, but didn't know if that would be bad (if I actually did have a penalty) - would Google tell me what the penalty was for if I e-mailed them?

I don't think I have ever had a link farm on my pages although there are many travel related sites that have a HUGE HUGE link directory and I assumed that this will not be considered a link farm?

I do have a handful of other links (one is a PR5) pointing to my site.

Any advice would be appreciated as I would like to get back to PR2 again and watch the traffic in my logs.

Cheers.

[OldWelshGuy]

Google will not tell you what you have been penalised for, but they normally say something like. ' thank you for your concern, there is no penalty on your site, the pages can be found on this search (they then give you a link to allinurl:www.yoursite.com).

If your pages are kosher, then get them linked and up for the world to see.

OWG