What´s the penalization extent applied by Google?

[enriquef]

Hi!

I still don´t get this web site penalization applied by Google due to duplicate content.

My site has many of pages that were among the first positions for top keywords (A Photoshop web site).

Those pages were linked by sites like LifeHacker, BoingBoing, Microsiervos, SmashingMagazine, John Nack, and many other  well known blogs.

After mid February 2012 everything went down the drain. I lost half of my traffic and my well ranked pages are now almost nowhere to be found.

I have plenty of ads in some pages of my site, and duplicate content (amazon product description only) in other pages of my site.

So, the good quality pages my site has, are no longer considered as good quality just because I have some duplicate content or ad filled pages?

I´m not complaining. I´m trying to understand this.

Google needs to serve good information to their visitors. But since they found some trash in my site, they decide to remove both the trash and the good information from the search engine?

That doesn´t sound logical to me. Why don´t they just remove the trash and leave the good content?

Of course, I understand that information is added everyday and some may come up with something better than mine, but dropping 40  or more places in the ranking sounds more like a penalty to me.

Again, I´m not complaining (although it sounds like I am!), just want to understand the reasons behind this.

Thanks,

Enrique

[anthonytjm]

The trash part of your site affects the site as a whole, not specifically just the trash parts. If they did just that, then you would still benefit from using trash to promote your good pages.

Now from what I understand about penalties, there is a manual penalty and an algorythm or natural penalty.

The algo penalty can be easily fixed by addressing your penalty issue, which would be duplicate content. Clean up all duplicate content and you will be on your way to flying under the penalty radar so to speak. However, you will still need to add more quality content to make up for the removed or cleaned up duplicate content.

Once that takes place you should notice your ranking drop stabilize, and over time begin the crawl back up. This would be a good time to implement other strategies like social media and quality link building.

Now if its a manual penalty, then you need to clean up all duplicate content and ask for a manual review, and pray. Manual penalties are heard to overcome and will require much more work. Sometimes its best to just start with a new domain from scratch.

Hope this helps some.

[enriquef]

Thanks! So it is clear that Google doesn´t care about single, good quality, pages with good quality links.

A good quality page needs a quality site to back it up.

Is that the criteria?

It sounds reasonable to me, but very difficult to repair.

Just for the records, my site isn´t trash or low quality, but it is an old site and has some quirks from old times: lots of directory entries with little content and datafeeds that used to work very well some years ago.

[anthonytjm]

No, google does care about good quality pages. Its just if you throw in a bunch of bad pages they dilute the goodness of your good pages. Once you clean yp duplicate content then i would suggest running a report on your inbound links. Check to see if your anchor text is spammy, or concentrating on only a few choice keywords. When it comes to link building you want to spread out the keywords to there isn't one or two money keywords banking on the anchor text.

Also, I would remove any inbound links from questionable directories. Once you do that I wold think you should see some significant gains in rankings.

[enriquef]

Yes, I know that's the thing to do, but you must agree with me that it's something unnatural.

I have thousands of incoming links, and only exchanged or asked for less than 20 of those. The rest are natural. If I spend time analyzing links it would be something absolutely artificial.

The same goes with quality pages. Let's say that I have four or five pages that are the most referenced in my industry (just and example, of course). Visitors that read those pages get really good, top class information. But I have an Amazon datafeed in my site.

Suddenly, the information of those top quality pages are hidden from search results in Google because my site has an Amazon datafeed?

I know it's a simplistic example, but it can be translated as:

"A good article isn't good anymore just because of a site penalty"

It seems that Google is saying something like "Hey, you can't read this amazing article because it is from a site has lots of junk. So suck it up and read this article of a lesser quality but from from a pristine site!"

It is not about my site anymore, but about trying to understand the concept of it all. And of course it is an extreme example, but I think it is relevant.

[anthonytjm]

Have you tried removing the amazon data feed from those pages? Just to see if that's is in fact what is impacting your rankings? What about the thousands of natural links pointing to your site? Are they all using varied anchor text or is it just five for your five main pages? If just five that could also be affecting your ranking.

[enriquef]

Yes, thanks, I will check that. I was planning to add nofollow to the amazon pages, I will also check the anchors, but since they are all natural, any change I make will look artificial.

Enrique

[anthonytjm]

sometimes what you call natural google calls spammy or unnatural. Just sayin. Good luck. Post back with your findings. Im interested to see how things work out for you. Best regards.

[enriquef]

Yes, thanks Anthony. I will post back as soon (soon..?) as I find something.

Enrique