5 June 2008
Google penalty is over!
Posted by admin under: Uncategorized .
Finally,google penalty has been removed and after 90 days of pain we are up again in google search results!
Google penalty?
I have searched and didn’t find any official source in google that admits what so called ‘google penalty’, but it does exist ,there is a cold war between Google and “some” webmasters, google puts rules to rank the websites in better way , the webmasters are trying to find out those rules to cheat google to increase their websites ranking , when google enhances his rules the webmasters enhance their methods too and so on, when Google find what they are doing he puts new rules to punish who are trying to manipulate the search results and depending on what they did google may remove those websites from his index or give them a penalty, in our case we got just a penalty .
How the penalty looks like?
In our case, if you were searching for “2mhost” instead of getting 2mhost.com as the first result you will find us in the sixth page!!, google simply added around 50 websites above our actual rank, 2mhost.com was ranked as the third website in “cheap web hosting” and during the penalty we became in the 6th page, ..etc ,as a result, we lost all the traffic from google and ofcourse lost a lot of business.
Check the graphs below from alexa.com
I’d say that we have dropped more in this 90 days, putting some ads here and there helped us to get some traffic, so the above graphs could have been worse without those ads.
Did 2mhost deserve a penalty?
Its really hard to tell, I believe we played it nice with our SEO methods, Also I think google allows some margins around his guidelines, the only thing that I feel sorry about is buying a bulk of links from a reseller with us, his offer was good , he has 100s of article websites,so the offer was writting some articles about web hosting and link it to us, spread it over 100s of websites then google will index this articles and rank us higher .. links are permanent, “pay once and get links forever” .. looks like a bargain to anyone interested in building links .. but it was easy for google to find that, we got 100s of links at once, all from similar, useless, long articles in websites that no one reads .. so google punished us, a 90 days of 50-lower-rank-penalty.
What we did to remove the penalty?
Well, we did 2 main things:
1. removed all paid links to us.
2. submitted google reconsideration form, which is the only way to ask google for forgiveness, you can find many articles that will tell you the etiquette to talk to google! OK, I followed every advice ..
personally, I think that adding google penalty and removing it is 100% automated process, I think no one at google reviewed 2mhost.com before giving the penalty or read my request(s) to remove it.
anyways, .. its over now and we are happy for that, I have learned a lot of things about SEO and I hope to write about them soon.
4 Comments so far...
Jonas Says:
25 June 2008 at 9:58 am.
Hi
Was the penalty similar to the one described here. Please update us with more info about the penalty since this is interesting :-)
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3647740.htm
/J
admin Says:
25 June 2008 at 10:06 am.
I do not think its similar, here the poster says:
“when I type domain with out www or.com yes my site comes first”
in 2mhost case, searching for “2mhost.com” showed other websites like hosting directories and such, and 2mhost.com appeared in the top of 6th pages … we got clear penalty, In this post I think its just some glitches.
Vicky Says:
16 July 2008 at 3:53 am.
I just curious. How do you know for sure if you are breaking any rules? And my website have never appear on the google search first page unless I type in the URL for my site. How do you get to make your site appear on first page with just keywords?
Thanks
admin Says:
16 July 2008 at 5:30 am.
Vicky: see what google says in his “Webmaster Guidelines”:
“Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank”
I think this is clear enough :) .. if you buy links, sell links or exchange them then you are breaking google rules.
How to make your website appear in first page with keywords? this is long story, just search in Amazon for SEO books .. you will find a lot of useful books