This blog publishes articles only on Indian career exams (both entrance & recruitment) and if you are a regular reader of this blog, y...
This blog publishes articles only on Indian career exams (both entrance & recruitment) and if you are a regular reader of this blog, you may have been surprised with the subject of this particular article – what the hell am I writing about?
The reason is very simple – I had faced very recently a harrowing experience called Google Web Spam Penalty. I now want to tell you what happened and what actions I took to come out of the penalty.
I am sharing this experience to help the webmaster/owners, whose site faced a similar penalty, so that they can recover fast and easy. Also, if your site has not been hit by spam penalty so far but you anticipate that someday it may be, you can take the lessons from this post to avoid such bad experiences.
This blog post has also been made to assure the site-owners that if you take appropriate actions, your site can recover from the penalty in less that 20 days! When a site is penalized by Google, the first knee jerk reaction from site owners (that included me!) is to blame Google for being rude. Next symptom is to sink to hopelessness, thinking that even if you take action, Google would not re-consider your site - it will always remain penalized. That is not true.
For the ease of reading, my experience has been divided into two blog posts:
How I recovered from Google Spam penalty – Part I:
Which is this post, introducing you to what is Web spam penalty and how I found out about it.
It tells you the actual actions I took and how I recovered.
What is a Web Spam Penalty by Google?
This is a manual penalty imposed by Google Web spam team to prevent website/blog-authors from impacting the Google SRP (Search Result Page) to rank-up high in search result by using un-ethical means (such as using too many keywords in a single page, among others).
In recent months, spam penalty is being confused with what is called as “Panda” effect. “Panda” is one of the new algorithms being used by Google to stamp out the “Content Farm” sites – those sites which merely copies from other sites.
There is a single distinction – while Google Web Spam Penalty is a manual penalty, penalty by “Google Panda” algorithm is not. In other words, your site must be too obviously spamming web to catch the attention of Google anti-spam cops to penalize your site – which will be drastic. Your site may altogether vanish from search result – as it happened with my blog. On the other hand, penalty by “Google Panda” effect is not so much drastic.
In India, many websites/blogs have been penalized by Web spam team recently but the site owners still thinks that it is an effect of “Panda” effect. Even I also initially thought my blog has been hit by "Panda", only to be confirmed later that it is not. If your site was ranking well in recent past in search result but has suddenly vanished, the cause may be more a “Spam penalty” than a “Google Panda” effect.
How I found out whether my blog attracted “Web-Spam penalty” by Google?
This blog (careerquips.blogspot.com) suddenly vanished from the Google search results on 11th August, 2011. I was shocked! More than 85% of my traffic comes from Google searches. So my daily page hits of 12000+ came suddenly to below 1000 as the following analytic graph would show:
For even the keyword “careerquips” for which this blog comes as the 1st result of the 1st page, post penalty it was pushed to bottom of the 5th page!
So it was a great shock. I began calling my knowledgeable friends, shooting mails to people whom I thought can help, began checking Google Help forums. But none of them could actually help me find out what is wrong. My friends sympathized with me and tried to help but could not pin-point me what was wrong.
Although I could get some ideas from Help Forums of Google, the feedback/comment from some of the forum members were misleading and disgusting – in one instance, one of the leading advocates of Google Policy tried to show her supremacy by finding fault with my blog template!
So who helped me actually? Google itself! On the very first day (11th August) when my traffic plunged, I had submitted a “Reconsideration Request” through Google “Webmaster Tools” panel (click to enlarge).
The answer came on 30th August (i.e. after 19 days): Yes, my site has been penalized as it violates Google's “Quality guidelines”- in other words, it has been penalized because it was considered a spam site! (click to enlarge).
Why my blog was considered a spam site and how I overcame it? Please visit the next part of how I overcame Google web-spam penalty.
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