I’ve been researching Google SEO for over 10 years and own over 100 domains and through SEO testing have had at least 20 domains banned/penalized in Google. I expected many of my SEO test sites to be banned or to gain a Google penalty since was testing SEO limits, so have a lot of experience with Google penalties and trying to recover from a Google penalty: both Google automated and manual penalties. Google Penalty for Selling Text Link Ads In 2008 I tried selling text links ads from a recipe/cooking site I own (used one of the popular text link seller sites) and after a lot of technical problems finally got the entire web site added to their text link […]
Continue Reading SEO Penalty
Google Reinclusion Request
I’m currently sitting in month two of a page six penalty.
I’m not sure what has caused it, but it has made me clean up the site quite a bit.
I’m wondering, should I submit a Google reinclusion request, or should I wait t out until three month mark has been hit?
dave
Google Reconsideration Request
Hi,
I can’t guarantee all penalties that can be lifted in an automatic fashion (as in you fix all the problems, Google respiders finds a clean site and reincludes the site) are going to be on a 3 month scale. I was very surprised the site temporarily recovered exactly 3 months after the penalty hit.
Also you can’t be sure it is an automated penalty or even one that can be lifted, my very first site many years ago I link spammed on blogs, guestbooks etc… and it got banned permanently since there’s no way to remove all those links.
If the penalty isn’t automated, but a manual penalty where a Google employee has gone to your site (maybe due to a complaint by a competitor) and has added a manual penalty. Google doesn’t publish how it deals with penalties, all we have is webmasters and SEO’s experience and experience tells me to clean up the site and do a Google reconsideration request, at worst you are wasting your time.
David Law
Google Reconsideration Request
Selling Text Link Ads SEO Penalty?
Well I’ve got TLA (Text Link Ads) on a couple of sites, my Google ranking still appears fairly good but I guess it could be better?
Do you think it affects other stuff like the quality of AdSense ads etc?
One site only has 2 links on it so am tempted to quit that site and see what happens.
Recovered from Google SEO Penalty?
Hello David,
Has this site of yours recovered eventually?
I am experiencing sg similar, and becoming a little desperate.
cheers,
G
How to Stop a WordPress Autoblog from a Google Penalty?
Hi, is there anything we can do to revive or change after 8 or 9 months to help the site not get downgraded or removed? Possibly Stop / slow down the MPP plug in and input another system or do something different. I would like to keep my sites ranked somewhat and keep them going so I have the options to continue to build them out or sell them.
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Based on your comment “What I expect will happen is the sites will be found and removed one by one over time, how long I don’t know, though past experience tells me most are downgraded in a year, but the odd one might slip through for a few years (I think with the MMP sub-domain approach plan for a 9 month time scale between creation and downgrade).
How to Stop a WordPress Autoblog from a Google Penalty?
WordPress Autoblogs Google Penalty and Thin Affiliate Footprints
Although I’m referring to the Massive Passive Profits Plugins autoblogs as likely to be downgraded (Google penalty) in a year (basically all thin affiliate content is generally downgraded/penalized long term), the MPP plugin has only been around 7 weeks, so this is based on years of experience with thin affiliate sites: combination of thin Amazon stores (used to use a PHP script that made Amazon stores) and affiliate sites created using affiliate datafeeds (Shareasale ones mostly).
What I have found is not to waste too much energy/resources on thin affiliate sites as they are generally downgraded within a year, basically do as little link building as possible to make the site profitable, but don’t aim for hard SERPs. I have a lot of sites I can link from, so can setup a test site, add a number of links and wait to see what happens. I’ve been running SEO tests for about 10 years, with affiliate content tests they can take a couple of years to be sure of the results.
When a non-affiliate content site is downgraded it can be a pain to get it ranked again even when you know what the issue was and you’ve removed the problem. No one knows exactly how Google etc… mark a site as not worthy of indexing/full ban (worst case scenario) or ranking well/Google penalty (still bad, but at least the site is indexed).
Based on the time frames of this and the randomness I strongly suspect there’s a manual element to downgrading a site in Google. Although I can’t prove it I have in my mind that Google works this way.
Google tries to automate everything.
If it fully automated all duplicate content filtering it would downgrade a lot of very good sites, so there must be a manual part to the process.
Since thin affiliate sites can get ranked quite well short term (the first year) clearly the downgrading isn’t automated on the content alone: it would be quite easy to downgrade all content not considered the original, though that throws open the question how do they determine original source.
I think the automated part is looking for sites with footprints that suggest they are thin content sites (affiliate site footprints). This can be looking for a site with content that appears to be only duplicate content, looking for sites running scripts (plugins like the Massive Passive Profits plugin) that leave footprints behind like linking to images within the plugins folder structure (like the buy now image) and of course linking to affiliate sites.
Google has employees that check sites to see if they are thin affiliate sites, there was a manual for these employees leaked and it tells them to look for affiliate sites that add no value to the affiliate content (affiliate content was OK, but it had to have added value like comparison shopping sites, review sites, with user reviews).
I believe a list of sites that have been found in the Google index by looking for footprints are given to the Google manual reviewers and they go through them. This takes time and would explain why thin affiliate sites can be ranking OK for months, even ranking for over a year before they are downgraded because they haven’t been checked and downgraded yet.
This is what I suspect is going on, but obviously can’t prove it.
As thin affiliate content users we have to go out of our way to hide those thin affiliate content footprints for as long as possible, so rather than having our average affiliate site downgraded in under 9 months, we extend it to a year plus.
It’s practically impossible to remove the duplicate content footprint, but so many sites these days use duplicate content (copying RSS feeds etc… and not just scraper sites) I suspect this alone won’t get a site flagged as possibly an autoblog (or at least not flagged high on the list to be checked).
Linking to affiliate networks like Amazon, Sharesale etc… we can hide the affiliate links from search engines. In the next version of my theme Amazon links created by the MPP plugin are invisible to Google etc…
Referencing (linking) to images or other files within the folder structure of a scrapper script/plugin. The MPP plugin Amazon Buy Now link is one such image, I’ve solved that problem in the themes next release.
As you can see it’s a battle that Google etc… wins in the long term. that being said it can be worthwhile to generate affiliate sits, but it has to be in bulk as they tend not to make a lot of money for long.
I would advise when creating thin affiliate sites is not to go over the top on backlinking. Add enough links to get the site indexed and move on to another site. It’s not worth spending loads of time link building only for the domain to be downgraded within a year.
Once a site is downgraded I’d look at how profitable it is while in that state, if it’s worth keeping, keep it, if not let it die. I can’t think of anything you could do after a site is running and making money to stop it from being downgraded. I suppose if you had a thin affiliate site that was making a lot of money you could replace the affiliate content with unique content or add some unique content for the front of the site (so it might pass a quick manual review). Imagine you had a site with 10,000 posts and the front 100 was unique and you were lucky that the manual reviewer only checked the 100 unique articles, you might get away with it.
I’m working on the principle the majority of autoblogs will be downgraded in under a year no matter what we do, but if we remove the obvious affiliate footprints it might extend it to over a year (I doubt it will extend to indefinitely though). My tests for this are still active (about 3 months old), so I don’t know yet (I know what happens when you don’t remove the footprints).
David
WordPress Autoblogs Google Penalty and Thin Affiliate Footprints
How Do You Know a Site Has a Google Penalty?
Hi David:
What are the “signs” to look for when Google downgrades a website, for example, an auto-blogged site?
Less traffic, lower pagerank, etc?
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Additional info regarding the “Why this ad” issue w/ Ads by Google. In the Google Adsense forum, a Google employee chimed in and clarified it. According to her, the “Why this ad?” text was actually just part of a small experiment Google was running, and it wasn’t connected to any malicious activity. She later mentioned that “Rest assured, your earnings should be unaffected and your account is secure.”
I wonder if running SpyBot S&D, removing the malicious code and finally seeing the “Ads by Google” text was just a coincidence? Hmmmm …
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Thanks,
Glenn
How Do You Know a Site Has a Google Penalty?
How to Check for a Google Penalty on an Autoblog
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
How to Check for a Google Penalty on an Autoblog
Site Banned for selling Links
Interesting story, I actually just had a site banned for selling links, and even though my traffic was stripped, the PageRank remains :) I guess I will wait and see if it gets gray barred with the next PR update.