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nikoladd
Site Admin
Age: 32
Joined: 08 Sep 2003
Posts: 391
Location: Plovdiv, Bulgaria
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About a month back this site was penalized by google with a PageRank penalty also known as "the google bitchslapping"  . So I decided to write what I learned about this penalty and the possible ways out of it.
There are rumors of many google penalties out there. Webmasters out of paranoia write new fairytales everyday. So how do we know this really is a penalty and how do we define it? What's the proof?
Well I define this penalty as follows:
1) it is a manually triggered penalty
2) it is a PageRank decrease filter penalty
3) it has consequences in SERP in some cases
As a result the penalized site loses portion of it's pagerank on the domain home page and all internal pages PR is set to 0.
This very site is a good example case for all of the above.
So let's get to the proof... I'll start with the PageRank.
I do know that there is a PageRank penalty on this site because:
- my site is nearly 5 years old and there are thousands of natural inbound links to it which are still there.
- there has not been a PageRank update at the time this happened.
- all internal pages have changed to PageRank 0 but nearly 60% of the inbound links to this site are deep links, because people have linked to the product pages themselves instead the homepage and I had a respectable PageRank of 4 on some of my product pages.
- according to google PageRank is per resource (URL) so there is no explanation of total loss of it over the entire domain (except the homepage)
Now how do I know it is a manually triggered penalty? Well I'm into computer science, algorithmics and AI too and there is no possible machine generated criteria that would penalize this site without taking out half of the internet sites you visit every day. Thus said there is no better proof than money and money talks a lot with google. Said in simple words they can't afford to enforce such rules upon everyone, so they get picky.
Now why would I care about pagerank at all? I've heard all "it is a secondary criteria", "content is king", "pagerank is unimportant" bunch of crap from Matt Cutts and SEO "gurus".
Well that's half the truth - pagerank is secondary in "the rest of the world" but is a primary criteria in US and about half of the visitors this site gets come from the US. So if every lie is half a truth this indeed is a good lie.
Want some proof that pagerank is a primary criteria in SERP in US. Do some research. Check what are the pagerank values of the SERP leaders in US and several other countries in the same international niche. You can check the positioning in US by appending "&gl=us" to the google search url. Change the "us" to some other country code and you can see the SERP they get.
Besides that pagerank is way too convenient in terms of algorithmical complexity to be abandoned by google.
Now on how to resolve the problem...
First solution: Just ignore them. Google is the problem so NO GOOGLE=NO PROBLEM - if the majority of the traffic comes from other sources and your earnings lie elsewhere just skip on google and let them mature. If you're out of the states and/or have well indexed content with well developed long keyword interlinking you will probably still get the same traffic from google too.
Second solution: It is not confirmed by me personally, yet! By moving your site to a new domain and permanently redirecting your pages to the new domain should transfer all pagerank to the new site without the penalty. Off course they can get even pickier and penalize you again, but that's a good solution for many. By doing this you can keep your content structure and all traffic and links + possibly improve your traffic where PR counts. There is the huge problem that this type of move under penalty could be detected automatically and the penalty could be transferred to the new domain. Personally I don't think google are that desperate or dumb to do this so I consider it very unlikely.
Third solution: "Fix your site" I call this "the dead man's letter" solution. You have no idea what to do, you have no guarantee that there is a possible positive outcome at all and finally you don't want to lose your time with some google smalldick pestry. But if you're willing to try here are some hints how to please google:
- remove all external links or place nofollow attribute on them
- make your site standards compliant
- submit a "reinclusion request" and explain in long words and tears how bad you've been and how humble and good you will be from now on.
David Airey did some of the above and his site's rankings were reimbursed. Bugging Matt Cutts in person seems to help too 
Now what I did...
- first nothing, just wanted to see if it is what it seemed - a google bitchslap
- I was pissed off. Very pissed off! And I went to sleep. Getting a good sleep it's a good advice, always!
- I've read a lot on the topic on the net. Fairytales mostly. And I went to a good webmaster forum I know and discussed the problem with the people there. It happens that other users on that forum have been affected too.
- On the next day I considered a heavy anti-google campaign, by buying the googlesucks.com domain and writing some truths about them... too late they own it and M$ owns the other best I had in mind. And I went to sleep.
- Then I waited for nearly a month to see what happens. Well the traffic from google is down the overall traffic is up. Google webmaster tools don't seem to recognize a difference and show my site in perfect condition. And googlebot walks the site like never before.
- Meanwhile I found out yahoo is getting better. I also found out that MSN live.com is actually pretty good and gives me about the same positions as google which means their algorithm is nearly as good as google's(not to say better in some cases).
- I decided to write this post to shed some light on the topic since I couldn't find any decent articles on the topic in google... and form a discussion, help others and receive help form others on this topic.
Now why dind't I do...
- remove all external links or place nofollow attribute on them - because first I don't want to. Second nofollow is a lousy excuse for google's inability to cope with the problem. It's bad practice too. Thirst I win/earn more by not doing that!
- make your site standards compliant - won't do that either. Too expensive with this phpBB based site and will only help G penalize me and not rank my site. I wrote an article on that, but it's in Bulgarian, so no much use of it here.
- submit a "reinclusion request" and explain in long words and tears how bad you've been and how humble and good you will be from now on - yeah right. Like the first two wouldn't be enough to give up on G.
Now why I'm so pissed off with google .... well the list is too long but let me prioritize:
- I have my hands tied. Can't move the site because I have some backend business services linked with it which are essential to me.
- I don't like being told what to do on my own site, by anyone including the "do no evil", strike that "the money talks company".
- I did a few link exchanges with other sites and I'm in dept of those people now because the exchange is no longer fair.
- This site earns way better from the exchange programs than google ads and with the freeware programs I host there is significant traffic to pay for.
As a result of all this:
- I have learned a few insights on some delicate parts of google's SERP logic which I will use on my other sites
- Learned to like other search engines more. I like how live.com performs and recommend you all to use it.
- Learned to make things less dependent on google.
- Decided to never use google's web based services for anything important and recommending others to do so too.
- Totally scrapped google search integration on all of my sites. I won't use that crap again any time soon.
What do I want from google? ... very little actually  just a statement like this:
"Google delivers to it's users not the results ranked to the best ability of their algorithm, but the results google likes best to ensure it's domination and maximize it's earnings."
How bad would it be to tell the truth? Do you have the guts for it? Mr. Cutts?
here is a post by Andy Beard explaining more details on this topic: ZeroRank - More PageRank Carnage (Round 5)
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