Do you really have a penalty

For long time there have been wrong assumptions on what constitutes a penalty in Google. Few years back Google has very less penalties but now we have lots of different type of penalties that Google can impose on a site to stop it from ranking. We have few of the penalties listed here
https://www.searchenginegenie.com/seo-problems.htm



So what really constitutes a penalty and do you really have one?
Here is a simple checklist to see whether you have a penalty or not.
Your site has been ranking for a long time but suddenly almost all the major keywords disappeared and only you rank for obscure keywords – YES you have one
Your URL is removed from search results and you cannot find your site on top even searching for your unique domain name itself – Yes you have a penalty.
If there is a notification in webmaster tools that your site is violating guidelines and has been removed – Yes you have one.
One particular keyword has been ranking for a long time but suddenly it moves beyond rank 100. Yes you have link penalty.

Sitelinks to your disappear when it used to be there before and a search for yourdomain.com without www doesn't bring up your site. But your site comes up when www is added to yourdomain.com. Yes you have a potential link buying / selling penalty.
If one keyword suddenly moves below 3 pages and never comes back even after 3 months. Yes it's what we call -30 penalty check the SEO problems page in the above link.
Penalties are not something we need to be worried. Even the worst penalties can be removed by explaining to Google. If you have trouble with your site don't hesitate to contact me and our team we will be ready to help you.

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Google guide on reclusion request after penalty



Google Webmaster Central Team comes up with an other useful posting on how to submit your site for reinclusion in care you fear your site banned or penalized by Google. Google has recently been imposing lots of penalties to a site though they are not totally visible to users. If you suspect your site is in someway penalized read this post on how to remove the penalty.



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Is TPR Penalty back - Google's Toolbar Pagerank Reduction Seem to be visible again

It seems Google's TPR penalty is back, Google around February this year brought a new type of penalty for sites that buy / Sell links. Its called the TPR penalty. In this type of penalty Google will reduce the pagerank of sites that are suspected of Buying or Selling Backlinks. It seems the penalty is back and more sites are affected.

A member has reported Pagerank reduction to his website forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=862890 here.

If you see TPR affecting your site please post here. We are doing some research on this and would love to hear feedback from others. We want to see whether TPR penalty affects only sites that Buy and Sell links or it affects innocent sites caught up inbetween. We have seen some sites loose TB PR without any link selling or buying that is why we need to ASK.

SEG

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tnx.net banned from Google

tnx.net is banned from Google for violating Google's guidelines. If you see their site tnx.net you can see they are selling text links without nofollow and selling Pagerank links which are against Google's guidelines. Their site is banned from Google obviously but to avoid looking like a banned site they blocked Googlebot from their site

their robots.txt ( tnx.net/robots.txt ) reads



Useragent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

Well they not only like to violate Google's guidelines they will also teach you how to hide links using their Spam tool,

forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=526547

The tool promotion page in Digital point forum reads

"Have you ever thought of WHY Google wants to scare you from buying links? Because it works great, when done with care, of course! In the previous thread "How to Rank N1 in Google for a Highly Competitive Keyword - Revealed" I spoke of some tips which will definitely help to stay away of Google's radars when buying links. Backlink building has to be done with great care - not to get penalized. 2 main points are: moderate link placement speed and a variety of link anchors to make links look natural. When over 100 new links pointing to one page appear in several days, all with same anchors (which is unnatural) - Google will most likely notice you and the pages you were promoting may disappear from SERPs for 1 month. This automated "too many links at once" filter is intended to keep you away from buying links, but it's very easy to avoid this filter! "



Already we know text-link-ads.com run by patrick gavin was banned now we have an other link broker under Google's radar go down.

If people think link brokers are the solution i recommend don't take that page. Instead find ways to improve your site and attract links.

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TPR penalty websites still not ready to change their ways

Lots of TPR ( Toolbar Pagerank Reduction ) Penalty websites which got affected in december 2007 update are still not ready to change their ways. Most of them like searchenginejournal, forbes.com, washingtonpost.com got their pagerank back,

Searchenginejournal was slapped with 3 points reduction to PR4 now are back to PR7, Forbes lost 2 points and was slapped to PR5, now they removed the paid text link ads and are back to PR7, Washingtonpost.com lost 3 points and was slapped with PR5 now they are back to PR8.
So what is the secret behind getting the Pagerank back and remove TPR Penalty.

First if you check Searchenginejournal they removed all text link ads and now all ads pass through a redirect script that doesn't pass pagerank,

Forbes completely removed all text links and possibly the pagerank came by itself or they might have sent a reconsideration to check their site for paid links.

Washington past now has Nofollow on all the text links they sell, if you take the source of their page you can see that the text link ads that go out of their page don't pass pagerank anymore all of them go through a nofollow.

I know there are some sites who are not ready to go friendly with Google when it comes to TPR and are happy to be at PR4 or PR5 and continue to do what they are not recommended to do. Instead they have their usual blogging power to curse Google for what they did to protect their algorithm. I recommend those sites to correct what they did and possibly file a reconsideration request to get back their Toolbar Pagerank or just keep the credit of running website that has lost some trust in Google's algorithm.

Though I would like to stay away from commenting about individual sites one site I personally admire is SEOchat.com they look too silly to have a PR of 4. Being hit with TPR a reduction of 3 points were applied and their regular pagerank was PR7. Obvious reason is their option to sell text link ads on their site without any nofollow which is not a great sign especially for a site which depends so much on Google to discuss in their forum and so many tools that query Google. Their forum's discussion has 75% discussion on Google and remaining about common issues and other search engines.

For all the 100s of 1000s of users who are regular to SEOchat its not a great way to welcome them with a PR4, Pagerank is like a fashion issue for a website. Most of the people out there especially people who are into search engines see Pagerank as a value of quality for a website. I hope SEO Chat a great site for SEOs will get their Pagerank back by no-following text link ads on their sites. They should set an example for all users who visit their site for SEO purposes.

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