What triggers this "penalty"?

I don't think this is a thing....it's almost imposible to review a noticeable precent of websites in the www jungle too make an impact regarding user experience.....also it's not economical fisable.....maybe for very high and high CPC keywords like payday loans or viagra this is possible.

Deleted member 923340 said:

How common do you guys think manual reviews are? There are gazillion sites. And they don't have gazillion employees.

Imo, unless you guys target some big boy keywords - we have lot to worry about before manual reviews.

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Oh boy, the same bullshit happened to three other websites of mine just this week. All of them were in the Top 5, suddenly BAM; sent straight to Page 5. What is going on?

How can I fix this?

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Said Albert Einstein.

You followed the same strategy with all websites (at least according to your initial post).
There's definitely something wrong with it--In Google's eyes at least.

Maybe try to do without links, or change your content/LB strategy for another one. You did enough "experiments" to see that your present strategy doesn't work long term.

Kikerinka said:

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Said Albert Einstein.

You followed the same strategy with all websites (at least according to your initial post).
There's definitely something wrong with it--In Google's eyes at least.

Maybe try to do without links, or change your content/LB strategy for another one. You did enough "experiments" to see that your present strategy doesn't work long term.

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I would agree with you, but there are two things: First: It wouldn't rank my website in the first place if the content, links or the whole website were bad. Second: What is ranking instead? Pinterest, .Edu or other High DA sites, which are getting spammed.

My websites are fine. All original, high-quality and handwritten content. Relevant for the specific niche/keyword. There has been a Google update last year, since then this problem occurs. I have ranked a few hundred websites, but this "penalty" seems to appear just since last year.

It seems like they devaluating new websites after they reach a specific ranking.

How many websites did you rank since last year? Have you experienced this?

Also, the question is: What triggers this penalty?

I experienced it before. I think you might be creating backlinks only to homepage. If yes, than just try increasing backlinks to inner pages through social bookmarks so that it looks natural. Earlier i used to do the same creating links, buying pbn to only homepage and as a results i have seen that keywords start ranking top in Google and suddenly after a few days it goes to the last pages.

So this time i changed the strategy, i tried linking inner posts as much as possible mostly from social bookmarks and used diversity links to homepage. I just surprised to see that now google instantly crawls and index new posts just after publishing and also traffic starts growing day by day.

The above might not the case of yours, but i think you should definitely try this strategy. Hope it solves.

nakamura said:

Also, the question is: What triggers this penalty?

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Your situations are always so weird got me seriously thinking whether you are targeted by a Google employee but I guess the chance is pretty low, and no one would love, or have no reason to do such a dirty thing.

I guess some reasons:

1) your particular pattern: like you always use expired domain, always do same pattern on every single domain, etc
2) or your niche is special (though I don't think so)
3) algorithm is really like this, unfortunately
4)you are targeted, again I think its impossible but what do I know about holly G!
5) your rank tracking tool is okay?

I would really opt for the manual review...
When you start putting your ass on the first page, they're coming for u

terrycody said:

Your situations are always so weird got me seriously thinking whether you are targeted by a Google employee but I guess the chance is pretty low, and no one would love, or have no reason to do such a dirty thing.

I guess some reasons:

1) your particular pattern: like you always use expired domain, always do same pattern on every single domain, etc
2) or your niche is special (though I don't think so)
3) algorithm is really like this, unfortunately
4)you are targeted, again I think its impossible but what do I know about holly G!
5) your rank tracking tool is okay?

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It doesn't only happen to me. Seems like it happens to everyone in this niche.

At the moment I am really wondering if it got anything to do with the hosting. Like they might blacklist the hosting or something? I am using Hostnine. I will register a cheap hosting with Namecheap just to see.

And yes, its really weird. Websites are fine, content is fine...and they even start to rank and get into the Top 5, so I don't think its content or backlink related. Just when it enters the Top 5 and stays there for a few days, it gets this penalty.

nakamura said:

I would agree with you, but there are two things: First: It wouldn't rank my website in the first place if the content, links or the whole website were bad. Second: What is ranking instead? Pinterest, .Edu or other High DA sites, which are getting spammed.

My websites are fine. All original, high-quality and handwritten content. Relevant for the specific niche/keyword. There has been a Google update last year, since then this problem occurs. I have ranked a few hundred websites, but this "penalty" seems to appear just since last year.

It seems like they devaluating new websites after they reach a specific ranking.

How many websites did you rank since last year? Have you experienced this?

Also, the question is: What triggers this penalty?

Click to expand...

Regretfully I cannot answer most your questions, because I've been working just on 1 website lately. So I do not have data, especially not if we talk about new MNS sites.

The message I simply tried to convey was that instead of trying to find out what triggers this penalty on a forum (if it is a penalty at all), and building the websites in the same way you've done up to this point (Einstein would define it as insanity), I'd try different approaches, and see if they yield better results in 2020 and beyond.

Trying different approaches (changing variable X or Y or Z, each time just one), is also the most accurate way to find a culprit...

You're in the game long enough, and I am sure you've changed your SEO strategy several times over the years. Now it's probably the next time you need to do so.

@nakamura, I am in a very similar boat. For one website, I just can't figure out what is wrong with it and why google doesn't let it out of its sandbox grip.

How are your sites doing lately?

My website is a 10+ years old website that ranked very well in the past, then was abandoned. Since a year I am now trying to resurrect it and have invested around 10k into it, without any kind of results. Google gives about 10 daily visits, despite that the website has over 500.000 words of content and 200+ unique very high-quality articles with imagery, videos and whatnot. Technical SEO is almost without issues, just some rather questionable warnings. A silo structure is applied to the website.

Everything was redone, every single article from the past was rewritten and optimized. The design as well, as was speed and mobile.

There was no manual penalty to the website ever, but naturally, linking practices were very much different 10 years ago. Not that many of those article/directory and other similar links, that were then considered good practice, remain today on the website.

In recent months there were some good pbn links, branded links, social signals and niche edits, guest posts built to it. Still no change.

I just can't get this one out of google's abyss.

@nakamura it could be anchor text problem or over-optimization algo penalty. How does your anchor text profile look like?