Can't Shake A Google Penalty? What To Do Next?

Are you one of those webmasters that simply cannot get out of the Google penalty box? Are you convinced you have a penalty that is keeping you from the first page of Google? Have you tried everything and still cannot achieve high rankings in Google?

A WebmasterWorld thread shows one webmaster who has gone through the exhaustive list of changes to his, what he calls, white hat site, to make it even more clean, if that is possible.

Check out this exhaustive list of changes he made to 'fix' his site:

- Fix trailing slash duplicate content issue through a 301
- Fix 'index.php' duplicate content issue through a 301
- Fix 'www' subdomain canonical duplicate content issue through a 301
- Remove all defective and/or thematically irrelevant links
- Added a privacy policy
- Added a creativecommons licensing statement
- Checked robots.txt -> nothing wrong
- Checked safebrowsing tool -> nothing wrong
- Checked meta tags -> nothing wrong
- Added noindex,follow to news index and category pages
- Added rel="nofollow" to a button of a thematically relevant high-quality top50 listing
- I NEVER purchased or sold a SINGLE link
- I added 'nofollow' to my free thematic business listing, just in case G might be thinking I'm selling these positions.
- Built a couple of nice high-quality links through guest posting.
- Added new quality content on a regular basis
- Added a tagcloud to improve crawlability
- Added a great deal of relevant wikipedia-like internal linking (as per Ronburk's classic post)
- Added noindex,follow on the individual tag-pages to prevent duplicate content
- Added the new canonical tag (yep, I am desperate)
- Removed interlinking (it was only minor anyways)
- Added valid XML Sitemap

He has submitted reconsideration requests to no avail. What should he do? What should you do if you are in this situation?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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posted rustybrick in Google Optimization at February 17, 2009 8:28 AM Comments (5)

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He admits when he searches for his url, it shows up on page 5 so that screams penatly in every which way.

I would venture to say he is stealing content, link spamming and may be borderline thin affliate.

So he needs to stop making changes, write his own unique content, quit link spamming or he needs to consider that Google slapped him with the MSSA (My site sucks ass) penalty and redesign with a new url.

Posted by Jeff at February 17, 2009 13:14

One thing he could do is post in the Google Webmaster Help forums. Sometimes having some other people (and perhaps even some Googlers) take a look at a specific site can bring up issues that might go unnoticed otherwise. It could even be that there are simple technical issues involved. Without knowing the URL it's impossible to tell.

Posted by JohnMu at February 17, 2009 14:43

Trinorthlighting just made an excellent post on webmasterworld and hit the nail right on the head. Its obvious there is a penalty, do you want to sit around and wait for Google to drop the penalty (Which may be never) or should you build new. He points to some people who were in the original -950 thread there last year and they still are stuck in the penalty.

Posted by Jim at February 17, 2009 16:37

Nice to see my post has generated some attention. I am writing a google groups post as I speak.

Posted by John den Haan at February 17, 2009 22:32

That's what hes doing now, what had he been doing in the past? I've always believed that if you do something more wicked than most that it will follow you around for a very long time. And based on what he's saying, I'm comvinced that in the past he was bad, and now he wants total forgiveness ...

Posted by al at February 21, 2009 02:16

Can't Shake A Google Penalty? What To Do Next?

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