Everything lost in one night - your opinion will be appreciated

Hello everybody.

I have been running succesfully my own 30 domains promoting local statewide services for more than 5 years. I was really happy, it was working really well. I was trying several whitehat and blackhat methods, always one with one domain only. Some domains were raising up their positions, other were going down, some were banned. But I had so many domains that I was able to experiment with new methods as always some of my domains were well placed on top positions for important keywords.

On e day I have decided to promote a new service so I have created one subdomain promoting it on every domain. In order to have it indexed faster, I have created one "links" page on every domain (30) and every subdomain (60 in total) containing a full set of links to all created subdomains (30).

Just next day I had a serious car accident and I spent two weeks in the hospital. When I came back, all my domains have disappeared from their top positions. I have removed immediately all lthe links pages, I have removed all subdomains too. But it was to late. I did not have the possibility to act earlier as I was in the hospital...

Two months later all my domains are still placed on 5-9 Google pages for the keywords for which they were placed on top1 or very close to the top. All of them.


I presume I was not banned as all my domains are still there. Probably I was red flagged. So I have some questions:


1. How long any website remains red flagged? I understand that we are speaking about some weeks but not months...

2. Is it possible that Google is multiplying red flag penalty per quantity of websites (for instance 4 weeks per 30 domains, or even 30 domains + 30 subdomains?

3. Will I have the possibility of returning to my previous positions when my penalty will be over?

4. Will it make any sense to try to promote any new subdomains added to the punished domain or simply I have to forgot it and start buying brand new domains?

5. Does it make any sense to keep promoting those websites?

6. Do any of you had this kind of experience and which were its consecuences for you?

7. Do you have any good advice for my?


Your opinions will be highly appreciated.

Have you had any message in webmaster tools?

It sounds like a penalty that lots of people were reporting a year or two back on forums

Sites were dropping about 5 pages

If I remember right, lots of webmasters sites did come back, but it took months. Dont know if it is still beung used or maybe they have bought out something recently - google minus 50 penalty

Might shed some light

Thank you for your answer.

Now I have two more questions:

1. It will recover automatically or I have to send a reconsideration request to Google for every site?

2. If I will create subdomain to any of those domains it will be also penalised as the domain is, or not?

I lost my rankings after changing my WordPress theme once so it could be because you changed stuff on your site. I did get my rankings back again after a few weeks though.

If I remember right, that minus 50 penalty was removed automatically after some time passed

But of course we have no idea of you even have such a penalty - its kind of hard to guess without seeing the site and taking lots of factors into consideration

I think I would remove the subdomains from say 5 of the sites, build some backlinks to them and see what happens - if they go up you know what to do with the rest - if not, you know the subdomains is not the problem

And in the meantime also buy some new domains and start some fresh sites doing as you did before without the subdomains

nefretete said:

Thank you for your answer.

Now I have two more questions:

1. It will recover automatically or I have to send a reconsideration request to Google for every site?

2. If I will create subdomain to any of those domains it will be also penalised as the domain is, or not?

Click to expand...

I will suggest you to forget what happened to it and start building new network, you can still try to recover it but dont depend on it

create 10 more domains and same topics on which you are getting good results, and start promoting them, you can buy aged domains also for fast results.

Many things changed in last few months and many new spots are available to target, just a research required

Hey, man you call that: "lost everything in one night!" ?
WOW!
Open your eyes and see our bros in Philipines...
Be happy that you survived this accident and the rest is nearly a daily biz in IM. Trial and Error.

You are right, mate, but it is hard to discover that you have lost all the results of 5 years hard work... Anyway, in Philipines it would be worst...

sinclair said:

Hey, man you call that: "lost everything in one night!" ?
WOW!
Open your eyes and see our bros in Philipines...
Be happy that you survived this accident and the rest is nearly a daily biz in IM. Trial and Error.

Click to expand...

If your websites only went from top 1 position to #5-#9 then it was not a penalty, but some of your backlinks lost value. Add some more good backlinks, thats pretty much the route you need to go down.

If you reverted things back to normal, submitting a reconsideration request is an option.

I do not want to attract G more attention to my websites. I would prefer no to ask them for reconsideration.

I understand that there are websites recovered without asking for reconsideration?

I have a related question too..

I have one site which ranks good for several keywords in google's country search but in google.com almost all of my pages are on the 3rd page. Is this has something to do with a penalty??

There must be some sort of foot print you're leaving between these sites. Were they interlinked? Were they hosted on the same hosting?

The penalty is going to continue and it will be red flagged until you disavow your previous links and focus on a new
strategy. Being away in the hospital most likely did not cause this but it was coming and going to happen anyway.

Just for your info:

My penalty seems to be serious. At the end of the year, after , they still are on the 8-10 pages.

I can see that ahrefs shows a big jump in backlincks quantity in september as a result of interlinking my domains. And a big drop down when I undid it.

I let them go, all my old domains, and I am working on totally new ones.

If you have given up on the domain I will take it I dont mind putting a little bit of link cleanup in it to get the rankings back. Its actually not that hard and usually takes less work than starting a new website.

To give you an idea i recommend analyzing your backlinks and removing other low quality links and paid links if you were buying links. Many networks were recently taken down by Google and that may account for something.

For future reference don't make link pages, those are footprints and red flags alone as link exchanges use those type of pages to link to other people for reciprocal links. How many times have you visited a links page and thought, "oh cool I'd love to visit all these unrelated websites!"? Chances are never because they aren't worthwhile to visit.

Again your main site can recover but remove the links from the network, vet your other links and remove whats needed and file a disavow only on those links you cannot remove.

[h=2]Everything lost in one night <---Reading this title i thought you lost your virginity .[/h]

I would have waited a month or so.. and if things were still not improving I would have built some quality backlinks.. and if things are still the same way.. then i would have considered sending reconsideration request to google as the last option before starting out everything new.