Google site reconsideration - I may have notified when not needed

[adam westrop]

One of my sites has suffered a massive drop in rankings, and although I have not been buying or sell pagerank links, I have been indirectly buildings links, however still have my PR and still all my pages are indexed.

I done an 'allinanchor' check for my keywords recently and I used to be ranked high with regards to the allinanchor commands and for just the keywords too, however now both of them are gone, thus I thought it was Google penalising me.

Thus I did a site reconsideration, and got this message:-

We'll review the site. If we find that it's no longer in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines, we'll reconsider our indexing of the site. Please allow several weeks for the reconsideration request. We do review all requests, but unfortunately we can't reply individually to each request

"indexing of the site" but my site is already indexed, do Google only penalise by de-indexing? Or when they reference this term, have they imposed a manual penalty of Googlebot indexing my site and ranking me higher... Putting indexing restrictions in effect.

Id be happy to share my URL for some warriors to investigate for established members, I can do this via PM.

[usearchme2]

Hi there

Just because you have suffered a massive drop in rankings doesnt mean you have been penalised, which a lot of people assume, and do exactly what you have done and submit a reconsideration.

In fact its a waste of time asking for a reconsideration anyway before you find out whats gone wrong, as they will just check it and probs find the same problem and not remove any filtering or flagging as they call it, but the odds are its not that.

Best thing to do is just type the name of ur site in google without the extension on the end.

for example not mysite.co.uk just type

mysite

If your site comes up as first result odds are your fine, if its not there then you may well be filtered (depending on the age of ur site as some sites dont come up as first result anyhow), you should also try typing ur site name

mysite.co.uk

in as well just to make sure it appears, this will give you a clue as to if your banned. If its there your not !

Im guessing you will be neither and ur site will have just taken a hit and dropped in rankings.

Its actually quite hard to get banned from and removed from google, its not so hard to get filtered however, which will still show ur site as being indexed but with massive drops in ur keywords.

BTW it might just be worth waiting a little while, and see if your site returns before you jump to any of the above conclusions, as everyones site disapears for a few days at some point in their net life !

Woc

[dburk]

Hi Adam,

You have astutely picked up on a common misconception. You are right to assume that Google's primary method of penalizing a website is by de-indexing the entire website. While it might be possible that a web page ranking could have been manually adjusted, that seems to be a very rare event. In most cases you can assume that if your page is still indexed you have not been hit by a penalty.

Google's spamdexing team looks for cases of blatant spamming and devalues the pages that permit this activity. This devaluing may not penalize the ranking of that page, but instead it removes PageRank and anchortext power from that page eliminating any influence that page has over helping other pages to rank in the SERP.

If your page is found to be violating Google's webmaster guidelines you can expect that page to be de-indexed and in some cases your entire website may be de-indexed.

Spammers cause a lot of problems for search engines and webmasters. If the spam is not detected and devalued by the search engine, their search results suffer, when it is detected the webmasters that have permitted the placement of spam on their website are the ones that suffer. It seems the spammers are the ones that suffer the least and that is why they will continue to be a problem.