SEO upheavals and penalities

I was talking on another forum with some one, and they were saying the usually "that works for now" type stuff. You know what I mean, those people who poo-poo anything new. Or different or risky. You guys know the type, they make the best sites in the world and always get top ranking etc supposedly.

Anyways I was sort of compiling a list of big changes, upheavals, and penalties in SEO history. For the most part in my experience SEO has changed very little at least in short time I have been involved in it. If you read SEO articles you would think that the engines totally change their algos once a week, which doesn't seem to me to be the case. But there has been some instances where the engines have kind of put the smash down on some sites.

Has anyone here been penalized or know of any big group penalties.

For group type penalties

The PR adnetwork(search king) thing I have read about, happened before I was really into SEO, I remember at one point google pr zeroed a ton of sites that were using the Zeus link software. Not the actually sites but the themeindex page in their link directory. Then there was the trafficpower stuff which I think had to do with hidden text with css (I am not 100% on that, anyone know better feel free to add)

Personal Penalties

I had a site that I thought for sure was penalized by google, it went pr 0 and los all its rankings for months, but suddenly last week it appeared top 20 for its terms. So I guess it was not penalized(?) I also have a site removed from the ink index. I am not really sure why but I think it had to do with url forwarding. I noticed some of the urls that were forwarded to it appeared in the index, shortly after it was removed.

Anyone know of any other penalties, or up heavals

Like was their a point in SEO history where all the sites using white on white text disappeared? or something like that?

My sig link page (the left one) has PR0. The rest of the site (please note the slow SEO method) has PR2. But this one is the page that gets hundreds (thousands???) of (SeoChat) forum sig links.

Now I don't want to draw conclusions (but then again: I have)

I had one smacked around about two weeks ago by Ink/Yahoo. Was after I migrated the site to a new server and forgot about a little linking I could get away with b-4 the server changes.


For the speed the site was creamed/de-indexed, I suspect someone reported it as it was doing decently well for a couple competitive terms and moving with a bullet. Mortgage people are so vindictive...lmao Ah well.... I deserved it. Win some ya lose some. I'll be back...then they'll have to win the real way...lol ;)

Do you think the site was penalized for interlinking with sites on the same server?

I have sites that interlink on the same server, not a lot.

I am in middle of migrating about 50 sites from a peice of **** hosting company.

Hopefully it won' effect anything.

lol, that was exactly why so be careful. Sites were on two different ip blocks and moved them both into one. Consolidating as hosting expires. I knew about the prob with Y, I just forgot about that particular link set up on that particular sites. Only reason I figure someone reported was the speed from migration to overnight de-index was a couple days.

Though it is a long explanation, it is a very legitimate use, other than the bunches of live links pointing to the one site (doesn't point both ways). I would typically use one link and a javascript on the rest to transfer interested related traffic...pooh...busted!!! ;)

BTW, the one that got slapped was the one with the live links pointing out. The other topic specific site wasn't touched/affected at all.

No, they used an onmouseover redirect.



The largest upheaval that I recall was the "Florida" update which sparked all kinds of discussions about Hilltop, Topic Sensitive PageRank, etc.

I sort of skipped over the florida update because no one knows why it happenend, and most the discussions about it afterword were so non-fact based. Also if you added links to any site that disappeared they came back, after a little bit.