Is this a possible Google penalty scenario?

[ACann]

In January we were banned from Google due to duplicate websites because of a server configuration error by our previous webmaster. Around 100 of our previously inactive domain names were defaulted to the directory of our company website during a server migration, thus showing the exact same site 100 times... obviously Google was not game and banned us.

At the end of February we were allowed back into the SERPS after fixing the issue and have since steadily regained long-tail keyword phrase rankings, but in Google are still missing our main keyword phrase. This keyword phrase brings in the bulk of our best traffic, so obviously it's an issue.

We've been unable to get above position 21 for this keyword, but in Yahoo, Bing, and Yandex (Russian SE) we're positions 3, 3, and 7 respectively. It seems to me there has to be a penalty in effect, as this keyword gets between 10 and 100 times as much traffic in Google than any of the ones we're ranked for, what do you think?

EDIT: I should mention in the 4-5 years prior to the banning we had been ranked between 15 and 4th in Google, 80% of the time on the first page.

[seoidea]

We are facing similar problem. Although our pages are regularly crawled by google but google doesn't show them on first page. Some are way behind after 100 pages.

[RyanKent]

Google does not penalize a site by devaluing your ranking on a given term. They either remove you from their index completely, or they may devalue links to your site which would affect your domain as a whole.

I would recommend taking a very close look at how competitive this keyword is, how well your target page is optimized for it, and make comparisons with the competing sites who outrank you.

For any further details you would need to share the URL and keyword.

[ACann]

When did Google state they didn't penalize your site in rankings? I thought that's been a trend for years now when you broke the webmaster guidelines in a way that wasn't strong enough to be banned but strong enough to warrant penalty.

Sharing the URL of websites I work on seems like a bad idea to me, so I'll keep it to myself for now. The keyword is "highly competitive" 53%, as determined by SEOMoz's tool and our page has been optimized for this keyword for 5+ years now - hence why we were on page 1 from before 2005 - 2011.

Only once we were banned from Google were we unable to move above the first spot on Page 3, despite regaining #3 rankings in Yahoo and Bing. I don't usually see that large of discrepancies between the SE's, am I wrong?

My one thought is that this also coincides with the release of Panda, though our site has no duplicate content issues.

[RyanKent]

When did Google state they didn't penalize your site in rankings?

My reply was that a penalty is not for a specific term. If your site received a penalty, your entire site is affected (i.e. all terms). If I was to stretch for a corner case, it would be where your site might have a page using a copyrighted term such as "herbal viagra" where Google drops "viagra" from the keyword phrase due to pfizer's copyright.

You can have large discrepancies between Google, Yahoo and Bing. Each company is independent and using their own systems. This is even true between Bing and Yahoo who share a lot of information.

From my own keyword reports I have a site with the following ranks for the same term:

Google - 9, Bing 14, Yahoo 3

Google - 20, Bing - not in top 50, Yahoo - 49

There can definitely be major discrepancies between SERPs.

[ACann]

You're definitely right about the discrepancies, I pay so much attention to Google that I had forgotten the other SE's show large discrepancies for many of our key phrases/terms.

My thought on the penalty for a certain phrase was that it had to do with the search volume of that phrase, but that's just speculation. I suppose only time and further SEO work will tell.

[seoninja20]

Did you see Rand in the latest whiteboard Friday. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/smx-advanced-andy-atkins-kruger-talks-international-seo-and-yandex-whiteboard-friday

Interesting stuff about Yandex and their Algo.

[ACann]

Yeah! That was actually the first time I had even heard of Yandex. Of course the issue is that I haven't searched in the Russian version of our keyword using the .ru SE as I'm not sure about any linguistic differences that Google Translate wouldn't account for (it's a financial industry term).

I'm sure we're not ranked highly in the Russian version of the SE though, as we don't have a Russian version of the site! haha