Google Time-Based Penalties: 30 Days Or More
February 17, 2007 – 3:40 pmIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
I think I had a website that recently experienced a time-based penalty from Google, or at least is sure appeared to. A search of Google hasn’t turned up too many exact examples of this phenomena, but there appears to be more mentions of this type of thing happening since December of 2006.
Pure speculation makes me think this penalty is related to several factors.
1) Duplicate content. When a website gets too much duplicate content it begins to suffer some sort of poison that ends up sapping the website of its’ rankings.
2) A link penalty. Google is very touchy about linking.
Now, I’m the first person to admit this is complete speculation on my part, but I do have one very important corraborating piece of evidence: My traffic came back exactly 30 days after it left, without me making any fundamental changes.
Whatever the situation that caused it is, I think it’s borderline. This has resulted in my newest obsession which is removing all of the duplicate content created by Wordpress. Believe me, there really is a ton of it.
I’m not sure if what I saw concerning this potential is a co-incidence, or not. That possibility exists. But it sure appeared to me like the site “popped” back in, exactly 30 days after “popping out”. I’ll keep my eyes peeled to see the behavior on another site in a similar position.
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7 Responses to “Google Time-Based Penalties: 30 Days Or More”
I think that Google is playing with a site’s popularity. This may affect a whole site, a page or two, or just the site’s ranking for one or more keywords. However, I do not feel that this is a penalty of any sort. I think Google is just likes to shake things up periodically.
They are trying to keep us webmasters on our toes.
A successful site is an unattended one. Why mess with success? An occasional downturn of one type or another makes you keep your eye on it.
This is what I have gathered from listening to many people make the same observations you have, and from my own experience.
For example, right now I am receiving very few visitors from what was one of my best keywords. I can think of nothing I could have done to cause this. I will bet dollars to donuts that in a month this will disappear without me doing anything.
Vincent Carlucci
By Vincent Carlucci on Feb 19, 2007
Dear Sir.
Regarding duplicate content:
I write news-sheets every week and put then on my web site. I put the sheet up in it’s original word doc form and also make a pdf and htm page. Thus there are three files the same except for the format. Will Google penalise me? Should I put a “no follow” atribute to the .doc and .pdf files? That would be a fair amount of worh as it’s currently over 200 files.
Regards,
Terry Quested
Webmaster of the Pattaya bridge Club
By Terry Quested on Feb 19, 2007
Vince, keep your eyes on the exact days it comes and goes. It’s very strange how they do things these days.
Terry,
I would do the nofollow on the .doc and the. pdf.
Google is a complete pain in the ass when it comes to supplements, especially when it’s duplicate, so make it easy on them. You can also disallow the files in robots.txt, just to be totally anal about it. I think Google actually expects perfection
By Darren McLaughlin on Feb 19, 2007
Absolutely,
After the last Google PR update on 1/5/07, my web pages, all of them, dropped off the Google map, I thought it was because I diluted my theme so much with my article directory. Cleaned out the non relevant articles, continued blogging, linking, article submission, etc., and 3 weeks later my pages came back strong as ever, even stronger.
Google still does not carry my main theme keyword phrases in the “in your content” section of webmaster tools which is how I think they are controling this behavior.
I think this can be prevented if you are listed in DMOZ, Google groups (which I am now) or Google itself. I do not think they would want to tick off their best customers.
Kinda weird!
By Leonard Bartholomew on Feb 19, 2007
Google just decided that it no longer liked one of my sites very much… just happened a few days ago. I’ll see if things change at/before the 30 day mark, to see if your theory stands. I’d hate to be dead in the water for 30 days, but surely that’s better than indefinitely.
By Leroy Brown on Feb 19, 2007
I know several people who have suffered a downgrade by Google and all of them practised reciprocal linking and cut and pasted duplicate articles to their sites. Admittedly, this is a good way to find relevant content for your visitors and subscribers but I agree with Darren in that it just makes sense that a duplication should fall back behind originals and recip. linking can be seen as a form of cheating (by Google) and most often is. Nothing of mine that has original content has gone backwards but some sites with duplicate articles have stagnated or have been left to slide backwards gradually through the pages by Google (for approx.1 month).
I removed duplicate content from one site gradually (as a test) and replaced them with (this time) “relevant” original content and traffic is also gradually returning - fairly quickly too - funny bout’ that!
My new motto is “original and sticky!”
Ray
By SEO Expert on Feb 19, 2007