who here really ever got penalized

[aussiejack]

I am generally a risk taker and not afraid to lose. Nevertheless I sometimes find myself worried about a google penalty.

But then when I read all these stories about penalties I ask myself: Do really so many people get penalized?

Not talking here about pure spam sites. Or about sites with very thin content.

Who here has websites which

• provide at least some real value to the world
• have a decent amount and quality of content
• not stuffed with keywords or other obvious newbie mistakes
• have a more or less quality link profile - meaning no obvious spam / some diversity links / reasonable anchor text

who here these kind of sites and got penalized by google? How often does this really happen?

 

[umerjutt00]

I had a site with around 50 pages of decent content and no shady backlinks. It was penalized for thin content (deindexed) ... Besides that, some of my legit sites did lost some traffic because of the updates but nothing major.

 

[Jack Torrance]

Yes... I get hit every single time. I remember I had to contact AdSense support once and the rep complimented how "great" the site was, little did he know it was slapped by 1000000 algo updates and collecting chump change. Rest assured, if there's an update my site is getting absolutely NUKED without fail. Doesn't seem to matter how ridiculously low the KW density is or how few KW anchors the links have, if it's my site, it's getting destroyed.

 

[420friendly]

I have had a site manually dinged for un-natural/paid links... the penalty came due to to many sitewide links on sites that where related. They even sent me an example of a link that was causing the issue of a link in a blogroll area in my same niche. I think it is really just who reviews your site as to whether or not you are going to get the hammer.

 

[aussiejack]

sounds for me like smaller projects
anybody with a real business website ever got penalized?

 

[Chiefjop]

Yup but I rather don't talk about it. It was big though ;(

*sorry I misread. You meant moneysites.

 

[chotavan]

I have an ecommerce website with over 1,000 products. I have been hit with Penguin and Panda, as well as a manual penalty. This was about 3 years ago. Although I got the manual penalty removed 2 months after the notification in WMT's, I honestly don't think my site has fully recovered. All my products were rewritten by me, all my landing pages rewritten. Evan after throwing over $3K a month at "high end" "well known" SEO firms, I am still on pages 5+ for a handful of my major KWs. Some big money KWs are doing well, but there are some, no matter what I do, I cannot move the needle.

I made some mistakes in the past, did some low-end, "grey hat" seo (please don't hijack the thread discussing black/grey/white hat).

 

[zagard]

:1: Got like 10 of them wiped at once with manual inspection, lots diversity and things like that, but main ranking power was sape due to extreme competition. Then playing the 're-direct, rank, re-penalty' cycle on some of em.. never gt algorithm pen so far tho

 

[SejtanovRatnik]

Don't worry about it. Simply create new accounts and start again.

 

[asap1]

I've never been penalized.

 

[emerica1184]

I got into SEO right before the big algorithm updates of 2012. I had a 5 page, 5% keyword stuffed website for a video game release that was up coming that had 26K exact searches at the time, expected to grow more as the release date got nearer. I was receiving about 20 UVs a day. Article Ranks were all the rage back then, so I decided to buy an article ranks package from WF for my site. Two weeks after I bought the package, my traffic spiked to 650 UVS, and I got a $75 pre-order. This lasted two days, then the first Panda/Penguin hit and the rest is history.

Talk about bad luck...could've been making bank.

 

[MuayThai]

sounds for me like smaller projects
anybody with a real business website ever got penalized?

Yes, my real business web-site was penalized a year ago. It has 3k pages and quality articles and hand-made (!) pictures. I still do not know what to do and WHY that happened to me?

 

[Bionaire]

The risk is always there. No one can give you a guaranteed 'method' of which you can rank without the slightest possibility of being penalised.

 

[nakamura]

As you can see there is always a risk of getting penalized. People with legit websites get f*cked without any excuse.
Important is that you don't make any newbie mistake. Once I had 5 websites in one Google webmaster tools account. One website got penalized and the next day ALL the other websites, which were quality and had no backlinks, got penalized too.

 

[SoccerLover]

I had been penalized in 2008 for copyright content n images
That was my first and last time

 

[fc-dh]

Yes, my real business web-site was penalized a year ago. It has 3k pages and quality articles and hand-made (!) pictures. I still do not know what to do and WHY that happened to me?

It is called a reshuffle, they let you taste the traffic and then take it away from you in the hope you buy adwords, that is has Google's businessplan from the get-go, they call it Penguin and Panda, i call it a racket, something i would do to if i was Google btw, they are the biggest blackhatters

 

[Nicheblogger]

I have had the google sledgehammer dropped directly on my head. (in my best English accent) Lets just say, I've gotten a bit whitehat mate.

 

[W9go]

Yes... I get hit every single time. I remember I had to contact AdSense support once and the rep complimented how "great" the site was, little did he know it was slapped by 1000000 algo updates and collecting chump change. Rest assured, if there's an update my site is getting absolutely NUKED without fail. Doesn't seem to matter how ridiculously low the KW density is or how few KW anchors the links have, if it's my site, it's getting destroyed.

google has you on the radar

 

[Ambitious12]

If you are risk taker then i believe you can get over through penalty,never ever fear about this.
Whenever you got penalized then you have to ask from the gurus here.
Good Luck!!!

 

[christianbed]

I only had one site get a manual penalty...it was one of the first ones I built, and this was back in the day of scrapebox and xrumer blasts. I torched that poor thing.

Funny thing is, after the disavow tool came out and I saw it had been hit with the ban hammer, I repented (I legitimately had no idea what I was doing), wrote them a nice letter basically saying 'Sorry, I'm an idiot. I've disavowed all the links...give me another chance please.'...and they lifted it within a few weeks.