Google penalty
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We had a client that picked up a penalty just after Panda and it ended up being for duplicate content. Funny thing was, they had been around for about 8 years and the content itself was also about 3 years old and had been scraped, copied, stolen and reproduced on several other sites in and out of the UK.
We contacted all of these people but also just rewrote the content and then, like magic, they were back again.
Point being - there are so many things that can cause a penalty. A hacked site, ripped off content, dodgy practices or SEO that for us to advise, is pretty much impossible without a link.
Hope it helps and fire over a link for some more targeted feedback.
Cheers
Marcus -
We bought some websites and we knew one of them had a penalty on it. Went through and took out all duplicate content and still nothing. It is on Wordpress.
The penalty started last summer. The other company has no clue what happened. They didnt do much in terms of SEO.
The site is monsterguide . net
If anyone has any ideas that would be great.
Things we have done were... got rid of all language pages, blocked search results, blocked basic wordpress folders, they had image galleries setup so each image was being indexed as its own page, that is now fixed, put canonical links on all pages.
Really appreciate any help.
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Hi Phatride,
Have you verified the site in Google Webmaster Tools and in Bing's Webmaster Tools? The webmaster tools will often give you information about any penalty, and let you submit a reconsideration request.
I'm seeing many pages indexed, which is a good sign. A not-so-good sign is that the article on How to Pluck a Chicken was categorized under Games, and has at least five separate ad blocks on it, some with multiple ads. The sheer number of ads may be an issue.
How do you know that you are still penalized?
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Ironically enough your site has a page on how to unblock websites: http://monsterguide.net/how-to-unblock-websites
(That page is actually related to individual users, but I noticed it and couldn't help but mention it).
You need to remove all ads from the site. Your not only offer ads, but they are at the top of your left sidebar, right side bar, main content and in the header. Users are blasted with 4 ad blocks the moment they land on a page. They would be the first thing any Google employee or human will notice when reviewing your site, and they offer a most unpleasant user experience.
I am not an expert on AdSense but it seems your page violates Google's AdSense rules. That would explain if your AdSense account was banned, but the Spam team could take action by pulling your site from Google's index, and then notify (or not) the AdSense team. https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=48182&sourceid=aso&subid=ww-ww-et-asui&medium=link&hl=en_US
"AdSense for content: Up to three ad units and three link units may be placed on each page."
Once your penalty has been removed you can replace some ads, but it is not reasonable to have that many ads. I am quite sure Google does not wish their ads to be displayed in such a manner.
Another concern is your site offers many followed links to other sites. If you link to another site which violates Google's terms and they receive a penalty, your site can be affected.
You really need to step back and look at your site's pages. Does the pages in their present condition offer any value to the internet? Would any user say "I am glad to have found this site"? Or are they more likely to run from the site never to return?
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Where in webmaster tools does it provide info on a penalty? Never seen that.
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We run other sites with 5+ ad units that dominate the search engines for their theme... and Google actually sends emails to add more ad units.
I will try this though and see what happens.
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There are times when Google notifies you in the messages area regarding things that it has noticed that are not in their guidelines (as an example, see this post on Search Engine Roundtable at http://www.seroundtable.com/google-link-spam-notifications-13652.html).
Can you share any information you have about knowing you have a penalty as opposed to the algorithm having changed?
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Google has some good information about what it looks for in quality sites at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html.
Of particular interest to ads is the statement "Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?"
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Figured I would update this... I made a lot of changes to the site before I placed this post on seomoz. Basically gave up on the site at the time I wrote this.
Spent about 2 months making changes trying to figure out what Google didnt like.
About a week ago I guess all the changes finally kicked in and traffic from Google has increased over 900%.
My original reason for posting this was to find someone who actually got a site out of the Google penalty. So if someone is reading this with a Google penalty, contact me and I will try to help.
In my case after I made all the changes it took about 2-3 months for Google to make the changes on their end. So dont expect things to happen overnight.
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I find your reply quite troubling. It should not take 2-3 months to remove a penalty. It should not require dozens of changes either. Not for a "good" site which has went astray.
If you have a pc that doesn't work and a tech says "hey, I spent a couple weeks working on it, replaced the motherboard, video card, sound card, memory, hard drive, and some other parts, and now it works" is that really an approach you wish to duplicate?
In my case after I made all the changes it took about 2-3 months for Google to make the changes on their end. So dont expect things to happen overnight.
If a site has been penalized, the first thing which needs to be determined is whether it is an algorithmic penalty or a manual penalty. The overwhelming majority of penalties are algorithmic in nature, and those can be fixed overnight. It could take weeks depending on the site, but it should not take months.
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Wow that is a horrible analogy. You really think fixing a computer and getting a website out of a Google penalty is the same thing or even close to being similar?
You act like I am trying to sell a service here or something. I am just providing information on the fact that I was actually successful.
It took a while for me to make the changes on the site because I had no idea what to change. We bought this site and it had a Google penalty... so I had to go through the site to figure out what could be wrong. Then went through it and tried to clean it up.
I came on here to find out if anyone has gone through the process of actually getting a site out of a Google penalty, but no one said they did. I do realize in Internet marketing, many people like to talk about how to do stuff, but very few actually do it.
Feel free to tell me that I am doing something wrong or my claims are false... but I am just telling the facts of what happen in my case... whether you feel its "troubling" is your problem.
Bottom line is after I finished making changes on the site sometime in July, 2 months later Google rankings have skyrocketed. I dont know what is so troubling about that.
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I have been directly involved in assisting sites recover from manual and algorithmic penalties. I believe most providers of SEO services have this experience as well. Penalties are a common driver or business for our industry.
I did not intend to upset you in any way. My only thoughts regarding your reply were:
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if you have knowledge about an SEO topic, please share it. If you feel you have discovered a solution, it would be helpful to let others know about it in the Q&A section. You can even write a YouMoz article if you desire which can yield positive credit and attention.
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generally speaking, taking months to recover from a penalty would be crippling to most businesses. I always strive to work with clients to balance their traffic, but when I first receive clients they often show 85%+ of their traffic comes from Google. If they were to lose that traffic for 60+ days many would go out of business.
I am glad to hear you were able to resolve the issues on your site.
Best Regards,
-Ryan
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