Page 2 - Google Penalty and Ranking Experiment

Originally Posted by fathom

A penalty implies voilating Google's Terms of Service (TOS)... you tend to know the history of your own developments and we don't so educate us... what were you to prior to June 4, 2008?

Rarely is on-page optimization the catalyst to dumb 90K/month in traffic - normally this is:

Paid links, using text link brokers, sitewide links, etc. and a year of the same results also point to that... since you have likely killed your trust and the only thing you can do is beg for forgiveness with Google and come clean with what you have done... e.g. if not some of the obvious mentioned stuff - setting up 100 or 1000 domains to link to this website... or a million other ways to manipulate results.

Originally Posted by 2sing3dances

I dont know ,i try to make a concept of this situation and the only logical outcome is that there is not one factor for this sudden drop.
This was my first thought thats why i wrote about googledances and panic.I will try to talk about it with some friends.

Originally Posted by zehrila

Hello and thanks for reading . Well, before i post what i am doing in this experiment i would like to give you a flash back on what happened last year June 4th. I have a games related website which ranked 1-10 for almost all of its keywords and was racking up to 100k uniques a day but on June 4 2008 google imposed a penalty on hundreds of domains accross the web and my site was one of them, i was smacked down to 10k uniques a day from 100k a day.

I tried several things to remove this penalty, such as i added fresh quality content, cleared up internal duplicate meta titiles errors, fixed sitemaps, added fresh links but nothing worked and eventually i got fedup.

I have recently started working on it again to get back my old serps or to get out of the penalty. My home page and about 5 of my internal pages never got slapped, they ranked steady for their keywords, however, rest of whole site was slapped, all those pages were still indexed and had their PR intact. Now recently i have started seeing my pages deep down the line, usually in between 7-12 pages down.

At this point i decided to do an experiment and see if i can get my rankings back with some strategy.

Day1: I have added a game page to my site, i selected a game which is due to be released end of this year, the reason i picked this game is because since it is far from its launch there is no competition for it which means it should rank instantly given that my pages are not penalised.

a: I added a game page to my pc section of site and since all my fresh content gets featured on home page which is pr5, this article gets on a pr5 home page.

b: Added 400 words of unique and quality information with images and a video.

c: Wrote another informative blog post on my other gaming site and inserted a link to my first game page.

d: Submitted my blog article to digg and got some votes, then submitted it to couple of social bookmarking sites.

e: At this point my blog article is indexed and showing up on first page of google, however, my first game page is still not indexed.

f: After waiting for a while i decided to submit my first game page to digg.

g: Google indexed digg page first and now when i wake up in the morning i see my page is indexed as well.

h: I rushed to check if this page is ranking in serps for its keywords and to my extreme grief, my game page was no where to be found in serps.

Iam now going to ask couple of friends to blog about this page or when writing an article about pc games put a link to my game page as a nice resource ( experiment purpose )

I will also submit my game page to couple of socialbookmarking sites as well as create a squido lens and a hubpage.

I would appreciate if you could suggest an alternate way of testing it or tell me a some innovative ways to get a link or two or just give your feed back. I hope this help others too.

Thanks