Entries from Search Engine Roundtable tagged with 'penalty'

A Google Webmaster Help thread has one webmaster who runs a home construction resource complaining that his rankings tanked. After some back and forth, Googler, JohnMu came in and said: I browsed your site's reviews a bit and most of...

Posted on September 24, 2009 8:47 AM

About a month ago, we reported that Google slapped the porn industry with a Google penalty of some sort. Soon after we reported the issue, Google seemed to have reversed the penalty on that industry. But we all thought it...

Posted on July 23, 2009 8:53 AM

On Monday we reported that Google spanked the adult porn industry by penalizing many of the sites. There were many theories as to why those sites were penalized. It wasn't all the adult sites that were penalized but a nice...

Posted on July 1, 2009 8:26 AM

A DigitalPoint Forum thread has a copy of a email sent to a webmaster for violating Google's webmaster guidelines. The email specifically shows the webmaster which guidelines they are breaking, in this case, hiding text. Here is a copy of...

Posted on July 1, 2009 7:57 AM

I rarely cover how Google is treating the adult online industry. But I have noticed a thread at Google Webmaster Help forums that is pretty heated on the topic of Google penalizing hundreds of adult and pornographic web sites over...

Posted on June 29, 2009 8:57 AM

Richard at SEO Gadget showed how Google seemed to have penalized specific pages of his site from ranking in the Google index. The penalty seemed to be fair, in that there were nasty comments that slipped through his comment spam...

Posted on June 18, 2009 7:41 AM

Throughout my many years (makes me sound old) in the search industry, I have heard about many filters and penalties, including a filter or penalty to prevent a site from ranking well for a specific keyword phrase. For example, if...

Posted on April 3, 2009 7:58 AM

You don't hear the word "penalty" come up much when you are talking about Google's AdWords program. I hear it all the time with Google's web search algorithm, but rarely when it comes to Google's AdWords quality score algorithm. In...

Posted on January 6, 2009 8:14 AM

There's a Google Groups thread that is discussing the ways webmasters can tell that their site is penalized by Google. In case you wanted to cover all your bases, you might want to try the tactics that they suggest you...

Posted on December 16, 2008 7:27 AM

I'll start by saying that this is not a case study. There is a WebmasterWorld thread that asks, how long does it take to re-obtain the old rankings one had, prior to receiving a Google penalty, and then Google reincluding...

Posted on November 6, 2008 8:06 AM

The other day, I held a poll asking SEOs how long it typically took for their sites to be reincluded into the Google index after submitting a reconsideration request. We have complied 72 responses and I thought I share the...

Posted on October 14, 2008 8:00 AM

A WebmasterWorld thread asks a very good question. Which penalties require a reinclusion request in Google? Yes, this is a tough question to answer. But it would be great to come up with a list of items that might require...

Posted on October 6, 2008 7:29 AM

Most SEO companies out there have been involved in submitting and waiting on at least one reinclusion or reconsideration request with Google. Not to say that you had a client that was penalized by Google but maybe you had a...

Posted on September 24, 2008 9:04 AM

I cannot tell you how many times we see threads that are either reporting or questioning if there is a Google PageRank update. We try to document all "real" toolbar PageRank updates here, but often, very often, there are smaller...

Posted on September 16, 2008 8:13 AM

A week ago, I asked what would you do if your site gets penalized. The options I gave were (A) Clean Up The Site & Request Reinclusion, (B) Quit the SEO Game and Play Golf or (C) Burn the Site...

Posted on September 5, 2008 8:09 AM

Tamar wrote a piece named Do Search Penalties Worry You? I had her add a poll asking SEOs if they are scared of search engine penalties. The 98 responses are back and it is about split. 56% are afraid of...

Posted on August 29, 2008 8:08 AM

A WebmasterWorld thread has early discussion on the topic of what to do about a penalized site. Should the webmaster destroy the domain and start on a new one or should he/she clean up the site and wait for Google...

Posted on August 28, 2008 8:10 AM

With the variety of penalty discussions we read about, one who starts following the forum discussion is bound to get paranoid. At least, that's the case for one WebmasterWorld member who considers himself "white hat," but still is worried about...

Posted on August 14, 2008 9:28 AM

There is a very large discussion at Sphinn around a Search Engine Journal post named How to Get Rid of Multiple Subpages & Not Get Penalized. The discussion is around the topics of using different techniques when removing or redirecting...

Posted on August 14, 2008 8:08 AM

At WebmasterWorld, a forum member is baffled by the fact that his homepage isn't ranking for a relevant search term; instead, one of the internally-linked pages rank. According to the forum member, the homepage has the right keywords within the...

Posted on August 13, 2008 9:36 AM

In a WebmasterWorld thread, the effects of 301 redirects are discussed. Can you be penalized? Apparently, the answer is yes. Tedster notes that a number of webmasters, when they discovered the potential of 301 redirects, "started throwing [them] around like...

Posted on August 5, 2008 9:59 AM

A Google Groups thread has discussion around a site that was hacked and because of it, now has many broken (dead) hyper links. The question then came up, would Google penalize a site that had broken links? The simple answer...

Posted on July 24, 2008 8:05 AM

There is an excellent thread at WebmasterWorld discussing if Google will ever fully "forgive" a site after it has been penalized. For example, let's say you have been slapped with a link penalty, and you remove all those bad links....

Posted on July 22, 2008 8:48 AM

The incredibly popular NewsDay.com was at a PageRank of five recently, and Google specifically confirmed that NewsDay received this PageRank penalty due to "selling links that pass PageRank." But when I look at the Google Toolbar now at www.newsday.com, it...

Posted on July 11, 2008 6:02 AM

A WebmasterWorld thread asks if it is normal to see a downgrade in rankings soon after conducting a link building campaign. In other words, a webmaster builds links to a site that ranks average. The next few days, the webmaster...

Posted on June 19, 2008 7:57 AM

A WebmasterWorld thread is suggesting that after his site was hit by the PageRank penalty from several months ago, he has been getting more qualified advertisers. Here is what this publisher is saying: I've noticed an increase in quality advertisers...

Posted on June 17, 2008 7:31 AM

A WebmasterWorld member wants confirmation if getting multiple links would cause a penalty in the SERPs. He notes that very popular sites which rank on the first page of Google have a lot of links, including those from "shady" places....

Posted on May 9, 2008 10:03 AM

Forums have been buzzing and buzzing about the possibility of a competitor being able to hurt your Google ranking for the past few years now. We have covered this topic time and time again, just see here for some of...

Posted on May 5, 2008 7:52 AM

A Google Groups thread has discussion about one webmaster that sees Sitelinks for his site in position 60. The search is for vacation realty and in the 60th position. While, I do not see the Sitelinks at that position, the...

Posted on April 24, 2008 8:29 AM

A WebmasterWorld member wants to know if you're alerted if your website has any penalties. According to tedster, you might get it in your Google Webmaster Central account, provided your site is registered with Google. (If it isn't, now's a...

Posted on February 5, 2008 7:00 AM

We now have official confirmation that the Google position 6 penalty is now being reversed. Sebastian commented to let me know that Matt Cutts of Google has confirmed at Sphinn that whatever was causing quality sites to be moved down...

Posted on January 29, 2008 6:50 AM

In late December, we reported about a possible Position 6 Google Penalty. What that meant was that many people noticed their number one or two rankings all of a sudden dropped to position number 6. Google's Matt Cutts denied such...

Posted on January 23, 2008 7:36 AM

A Google Groups thread asks if there's any such penalty for using the z-index HTML attribute underneath images. Would that be deceiving the search engines if you're putting text underneath an image that is not apparent to the visitor? Bergy...

Posted on November 15, 2007 10:02 AM

After all the recent Google PageRank news and "penalties," the big question is, are SEOs still buying links? A DigitalPoint Forums thread has a poll, that is asking that question. They break the poll down into four possible answers. Here...

Posted on November 14, 2007 6:59 AM

A new WebmasterWorld thread has new reports of German webmasters receiving fake emails from Google that their site has been penalized. Just a reminder, we covered this news in the past and that these are fake. Google said they would...

Posted on June 20, 2007 8:03 AM

A user on WebmasterWorld mentions that his page rankings have dropped considerably after what appears to be a hack attempt on his server. According to the user, a vulnerability on his web host was exploited, and 50,000 new pages on...

Posted on March 20, 2007 9:11 AM

A Cre8asite Forums thread asks, how do you know if a search engine has penalized your site? With most engines, the quickest method of checking that is to see if the engine has you in their index. How do you...

Posted on November 13, 2006 7:07 AM