Comments on: How I reversed my Google ranking penalty

By: Colin

Colin — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 00:30:27 +0000

This is a great article.

I do wish thought that google, yahoo, bing etc would provide profile tools we could use to scan our sites. When a hit occurs in our ranking, it really is stabbing in the dark sometimes as to why it has happened.

By: David Airey

David Airey — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 08:57:46 +0000

Hi Andrew, it’s possible your drop could be a temporary thing that corrects itself the next time Google crawls your site. Patience is a hard-practiced virtue in these cases.

By: Andrew Saladino

Andrew Saladino — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 22:15:44 +0000

My search engine rankings for a website I’m working on has dropped terribly over the last week. I made some modifications to the homepage and I’m trying to decide if the changes I made to the website were the problem or is it the link neighborhood my website is in. I changed the homepage back to the way it was before but do you think I should try to contact someone from Google regarding it or wait to see if there is a change?

Thanks.

By: tamaras

tamaras — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 05:26:37 +0000

I think it’s about time that google tells everyone who is getting a penalty, why the site gets this penalty and what the solution is.

By: amit

amit — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 08:07:14 +0000

Hello david,

First we think its a great article and important for people to understand why seo has to made by someone who know what no to do….

second is a question for all of you thay maybe know if there is any panalty checker that can say if a site got it ? and if it did, what is the panalty and what should site owner do.

By: Xtence

Xtence — Sun, 03 May 2009 09:38:08 +0000

Hi David,
This is a great post, everybody who’s taking SEO serious should read this, they”ll learn a lot from it!
I had a similar issue like this, but this came from a very different corner, one of the websites i developed was, after 2 years of nice ranking on the first page for ‘verlichting’ (sorry i’m from belgium), it dissapeared and was not found on the first 50 pages! After a bit of research on this i found out that the website, who was hosted by a well-known firm, shared an IP with about 100 other sites, which is quite common on shared hosting, fact was, some of the sites on this IP were spamming and using black hat SEO on the go, and the IP was simply banned from google, all of them (i checked), moving this domain to my, then new, server with an uniquie IP and having send a mail to the link in google webmaster tools , ( probably the same as you did) this was solved.

By: Milbach's Scratchpad

Milbach's Scratchpad — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 19:08:16 +0000

I am just learning the art of SEO and this topic really jumped at me. I do know the difference between black and white hat SEO and all of the negative effects of black hat SEO. I didn’t know that you could have penalties removed by Google. This is great to know, not that I would get any penalties. As my website evolves and I add more elements to it, I should be aware of things that could hurt my SEO if I’m not paying attention.

Thanks again for a great blog

By: David Airey

David Airey — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 14:03:15 +0000

Ah yes, cheers Andrew.

My single.php already had the post permalink wrapped in h2 tags, so I’ll just replace those with h1 for now. Seems like a quick and easy temporary fix. There won’t be any h2, but at least there’ll be h1.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 13:54:48 +0000

Bah, all the code is being truncated when it posts the comment. Not sure if it will display on your end as the admin, if not let me know and I could email you it David.

Andrew.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 13:52:28 +0000

H1 tags for your posts is easy as pie.

In your wordpress adin panel go to appearance / editor and select “Single Post (single.php)”.

There should be a line:

It will only be 5-6 lines down, just add the H1 tags to surround the title lookup like so:

That’s for wordpress 2.7.1 but i don’t imagine it’s different on older versions if your running one.