How I Recovered from a Google Penalty

[dvduval]

Let me preface by saying that I've worked with hundreds of sites over 10 years and I can think of just two times I had a domain penalized. In this case I believe the problem was I accepted money for a large number of links to be placed on my site (and it was worth it!). Worse, I think the person who was buying all the links was doing the same thing with other people. This is something that occurred more than 2 years ago, and only in last few months did google penalize the site.

The first thing I did was get rid of those links (as my obligation had expired). The next thing I did was build content, and then went social, encouraging my facebook friends to make comments using the facebook comments widget. By the time google decided to reinclude me in their index I was already getting way more traffic from Facebook than Google.

The site is Business Plexus, and here is where I discussed my experiment on WF two months ago. It seems to have worked! I have pagerank again and am receiving traffic from google. No more greyed out pagerank bar.

[FrankLinks]

hi,does your site get deindexed by google,and through your Facebook promotion you recovery it?

I have the same problem,two of my sites get penalty by google that lots of keywords can't rank greater than 40 or 50,so called google -50 penalty.now my question is if I must beg google's reconsideration or just add quality content and backlinks,the sites will recovery themselves.

[tadsam12]

first you have to know the reason of penalty then make the changes in your website and put it for reconsideration on google through google webmaster tools.

[WilliamBLee]

You should review your website about the duplicate content or any script which hits Google search engine and then submit to Google re consideration.

[dvduval]

Originally Posted by tadsam12

first you have to know the reason of penalty then make the changes in your website and put it for reconsideration on google through google webmaster tools.

Unfortunately, I don't think google always tells you why your site is not ranking (or even penalized).

But from what I have determined, it recent months their algorithm is progressively more weighted toward user activity, and links play a MUCH smaller role in rankings. They definitely still carry significant weight, but that weight is depreciated significantly.