what do you do when you know you haven’t do anything wrong, but Google still gives you a penalty
Take http://www.indigoclothing.com/and Alex is a reader and sometimes comments on my blog, I got an IM from him today asking me to look at his site more a favour and than anything else, see you it looks like his site has been hit with a penalty.
so I asked Alex a few simple question.
ME: Links.. have you purchased any say in the last 6 months ?
Alex : NO
ME What site changes have you made
Alex we added a hidden Div and Google analytics’s
ME WTF .. you mad Hidden Div?
Alex you can see on homepage, the green bar below images click it…. Scriptalicious
ME ok .. how do you handle 404’s
Alex ???? serverside we serve a 404 with links
Me : you got any new links recently, it has to be link related mate
Alex : we won the Wordpress contract to run their shop
Me : Link please
Alex : http://shop.wordpress.net/
Me : http://shop.wordpress.net/world/about/ I bet that fucked you up
Alex : what should we do ask them to remove the links and file a reinclusion request
Me: WHAT ! you have done nothing wrong… I ranted for a while… what I would do is
a) If you don’t have google webmaster central account - get one
b) Yes file a re-inclusion request
c) Pray a lot
so what would you do in this case.. you know you haven’t made any mistakes but you still got hit with a Google penalty
DaveN
21 Comments
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25th March 2008 @ 18:03
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not sure how long ago your conversation was with Alex but I can’t see any penalty from my side?
Ranks 6th for promotional clothing which I don’t think it’d do with a penalty.
25th March 2008 @ 18:08
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3
Google couldn’t of possibly classed that link… as a paid link!?
a. re-inclusion
b. pray an awful lot
c. contact a Google person!25th March 2008 @ 18:15
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@ tom .. because I know where they used to rank for t-shirt printing
@ Adam Moro .. because I know where they used to rank for t-shirt printing @ dubibob .. why not Wordpress has had sub domain history in the past25th March 2008 @ 18:31
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Going through something similar, but this person has major feeds that already exist on the web, so about 95% of the content is lower quality, we are going to robots.txt exclude the whole site and only include the pages that have unique content. We got rid of the link exchange once we took them on - a great leftover for us!
25th March 2008 @ 18:45
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nah, slim to none on the wordpress link…i’d look else where…
25th March 2008 @ 19:17
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http://www.indigoclothing.com/ is nofollowing the recip link to wp…
25th March 2008 @ 19:19
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Ok ok. I see the placement’s dropped significantly (for a lot more than just t-shirt printing actually). But you think it has something to do with the links on the WordPress Shop page?
25th March 2008 @ 19:21
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A penalty to the 2nd page? I’m not sure this is a penalty. I think a lot of their backlinks have just be devalued for various reasons (overzealous backlink devaluing) causing an overall drop. For example, Yahoo shows around 10K backlinks and they have one sitewide backlink that probably takes up 4K of that. If that one got nail, thats a big chunk gone.
25th March 2008 @ 20:19
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10
I don’t think its that link from that page, the page isn’t cached as its disallowed by the robot.txt.
Sitemap: http://shop.wordpress.net/sitemap_index.xml
User-agent: *
Disallow: /world/privacy-policy
Disallow: /world/aboutMaybe its due to the link on the bottom right of each page which is on every page of the shop which totals at 23 pages???
25th March 2008 @ 20:21
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I’m betting stuff like this:
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/donate.html
http://screenprinters.net/links.phpdoesn’t help.
25th March 2008 @ 21:06
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@Joost the DigitalPoint page has been around forever.. something happen recently.. mind you I’m seeing some more sites getting culled as well so maybe we are just see the start of round 3 in the link war..
Dave
25th March 2008 @ 21:28
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good catch JC, not sure no long that’s been on there for thou
25th March 2008 @ 21:29
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“what do you do when you know you haven’t do anything wrong, but Google still gives you a penalty”
Re-examine your assumptions? E.g. http://web.archive.org/web/20070817163057/http://www.indigoclothing.com/blog/ is a link that shows when they were selling links. Later versions of their site were selling even more links, e.g. “sexy underwear” links.
Google has been very clear about how we feel about selling/buying links. If indigoclothing.com has dropped their text link ads and remove the links that they sold, they could do a reconsideration request. According to the data I looked at, the site has never done a reconsideration request.
26th March 2008 @ 00:30
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@phil we nofollowed the WP recip links recently (2-3 weeks ago) as part of a wider but select use of nofollow on some internal pages (contact us link in page footers for example). Would you not recommend this?
@jc that robots.txt is only excluding one of the about pages (there are 2 - http://shop.wordpress.net/usa/about) - as the Wordpress shop has 2 stores (Americas and World) we excluded the world store recently (2 weeks ago) from the index to avoid dupe content issues.
Thanks to everyone so far for the input.
26th March 2008 @ 09:09
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I have also just now taken down the following paragraph from the WP store about page as I am sure, like Dave says, this is one element of the problem:
“The WordPress Shop is managed by Indigo Clothing, a UK based t-shirt printing company.”
26th March 2008 @ 09:24
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It’s obviously some kind of penalistation. Try to search for a uniqe phrase like “Indigo is a quality t-shirt printer” on Google. You must click “repeat the search with the omitted results included” for indigoclothing.com to show up. If you do, you’ll see that Google knows about no less that five versions of their homepage:
- http://www.indigoclothing.com/
- http://www.indigoclothing.com/?gad=CKzz6toBEghxwdSkrvH2SBjcooL_AyC0vNMP
- http://www.indigoclothing.com/index.php
- http://www.indigoclothing.com/?gclid=CIakzvOt_IoCFQMrlAodQjZWFA
- http://www.indigoclothing.com/cgi-bin/page.cgi?d=1&page=homepageI would suggest some work with robots.txt and htaccess to prevent Google from indexing these duplicated pages.
Good luck!
26th March 2008 @ 10:17
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Matt Cutts has mostly nailed it, but the Duplicate Content issue can never be a good thing too.
26th March 2008 @ 18:32
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Here is where MattCutts/Google’s position makes no logical sense.
Check out this page:
http://sports-ak.espn.go.com/mlb/clubhouse?team=nyy-see the ad and text link for StubHub “New York Yankees Tickets”:
Check out this press release:
ESPN and StubHub Team Up to Provide Tickets to Sports Fans
http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release.do?id=789288Here is my question:
Did ESPN/Disney/ABC just “sell” a backlink to StubHub/Ebay? Should ESPN and StubHub lose all of their organic listings now?27th March 2008 @ 18:24
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[...] them from its site about six months ago. The site was recently penalized by Google, and Matt Cutts indicated to Naylor that the cause was likely past sales of paid [...]
28th March 2008 @ 03:50
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[...] ball here with me as Dave (Naylor) had an interesting journey with TLA and Google this week Reinclusion Request - indigoclothing Matt Cutts 1 - DaveN 0 How Google is killing sites for buying or selling links If you use TLA [...]
29th March 2008 @ 17:40
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