Comment on Google Penalty Recovery by SEO Dave.

Google Penalty Checker A downgraded autoblog site is harder to spot than a banned one. A banned in Google autoblog is easy to spot, it’s basically no longer indexed (used to be) despite backlinks.

For a site that’s downgraded (penalized) you’ll tend to see significantly less traffic than before and it will tend to be almost over night.

So Monday a site was at 1,000+ visitors a day, Wednesday it’s at 200 or less and you haven’t done anything to directly cause a drop in traffic (if you deleted all the content for example it would be no surprise traffic dropped).

If you treated an autoblog like a normal site and put significant effort into backlinks and despite having enough aged links to rank well for easy SERPs you are barely seeing any traffic, could be that autoblog was found early and was penalized before it ever ranked for anything. You’ll never know for sure it’s penalized, but you’ll suspect it.

Worst is when a site just starts to rank well, you start seeing that nice growth trend in traffic and it’s downgraded (really sucks).

This has happened to me a lot with thin affiliate sites I’ve had a decent link campaign for, feels like being a victim of your own SEO success and suspect it’s a case by gaining more traffic your site rises up the list of sites with red flags (affiliate site footprints) that needs checking sooner rather than later by the manual reviewers.

Google knows exactly how much traffic it’s sending a site, if a domain is gaining 5 visitors a day what’s the rush in checking if it needs penalising, if a sites in the thousands of visitors a day territory time to check it out.

For this reason I would advise a softly softly approach on backlinking, better to have 100 sites with 200 visitors a day each and remain that way for years to come (in theory) than 100 sites with 500 visitors a day, but they will drop to practically no traffic a year from creation! Currently testing this concept out (normally give a site a decent link campaign).

BTW Don’t look at a site with say 50 visitors a day and it drops to 30 visitors a day and think that’s a penalty. That’s probably normal day to day Google algorithm changes or you’ve got less link benefit going to the site (not a penalty, normal day to day SEO ups and downs). It’s the big changes you are looking for, 1,000 visitors dropping to 200 or less practically over night (I can’t think of one of my sites that was penalized that it wasn’t over night). Recovery on the other hand (if you made an SEO mistake and fixed it) can take months/years to recover if ever!

David