If your site suddenly suffers a sharp drop in traffic, then you may be suffering from a Google penalty.
What is a Google penalty?
This is when Google, either via their algorithms or as a part of a manual review, drop your site from 15 to 950 places in their results. 30-60 places seem to be the most common.
There is a simple test to see if your site is being penalised. Search for just your domain name [ie: domain_name.com - without the .com] on Google, MSN, & Yahoo. If Google's position is significantly lower, then you most likely are suffering from one of these penalties.
Google does not officially acknowledge that they place sites under a penalty, but the SEO industry accepts that it does occur. You will notice that any public comment from Google with respect to penalties or changes to the indexing process is very carefully worded. Acknowledging that they treat sites differently could place them in a difficult situation if they were to be deemed a monopoloy [which lets face it, they clearly are.. 90% of my site's traffic comes from google, about 2% from the next search engine, Yahoo].
Why me? What's going on?
The simple answer is Google feels that your site breaches their webmaster guidelines.
The most likely culprits are:
large number of inbound links to your site suddenly appearing; probably as a result of links you've paid for.
large number of links from blog sites suddenly appearing; known as over promotion,
Your site has known blackhat techniques [Hidden text and links, 302 redirections instead of 301, etc..]
What can you do about ?
Getting angry will not help. Sending threatening legal letters will not help.
Google's anti-spam team, headed by Matt Cutts, are the ones responsible for your situation. They truly don't care about your difficulties.
<a bit of history>
Google have had & continue to have considerable problems with people gaming their index.
Their view is giving out information as to why sites have been penalised will help spammers. Thus, they generally don't respond to any requests.
They know they will cause people to suffer, but have made that decision.
They want to cost spammers as much time as possible.
</a bit of history>
Understand that Google now considers your site to be in breach of their guidelines, so find the cause & then fix it. Be prepared for this to take months, even over a year.
No, really. What can I do?
Firsly, sign up to Google's webmaster tools.
These are google's tools for webmasters to see how Google views their site. The dashboard also allows you to send a reconsideration request to google.
Before you send a reconsideration request, you need to identify what is wrong & fix it. Google will not tell you what is wrong, so its very much a random process.
1. Review Google's Webmaster tools & resolve any issues. Of particular interest should be:
- Diagnostics->Web crawl
- Diagnostics->Content analysis
- Links->Pages with external links
With respect to Links->Pages with external links. Review all the sites with links to your yours. If any of these are from paid advertising, Google may deem these to "paid links" & thus spam; so remove them from the offending sites ASAP.
If you have a large amount of inbound links from one site to yours, Google may deem this as suspicious.
If you have reciprocal links, again this pattern may be deemed as suspicious.
Do you sell links on your site? If so, then Google may not be considering you a spammer.
2. Review your site & fix the following:
- Validate your site with a html validator.
- Examine each page & look for any hidden text or links that that may appear to be
- If you have any redirections, ensure that they are 301 - moved permanently, as to many 302 redirections will look like blackhat techniques.
Once you have reviewed & fixed the above, then file a reconsideration request in Google's Webmaster Tools. Do not expect a response as you won't get one. Your traffic will come back all of a sudden, or not at all. If your traffic has not come back, then you know that you have missed something, so review your site, your site's outbound links, and inbound links. Once you feel that you have resolved the problem, file another reconsideration request.
I have read stories of people having their site penalised for over a year, its a very disheartening process.
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