How to handle SEO penalties ( and how to behave afterwards )

In this presentation the guys from SEOMoz are letting us know what to do after the unpleasant discovery that our site has been hammered and slashed by a Google penalty.
To recapitulate the video - you should first of all remain seated, calm and concentrate on the possible temporally ranking or traffic issues - it might be that you're not under a real threat, but just something minor and for the moment.
Next, if this is not the case - you should check what wrong have you done, and make your way back. This includes getting rid of the things and techniques used.

SEOmoz | Whiteboard Friday - Oh $#!%, I Got a Penalty

The only thing I've come upon close enough was a few times *they* coming on my sites with an ISP entry like "Google, Mountain View CA"
Living on the edge but not crossing it

Great find SeoKungFu, at least we will know how what to do just in case we will penalize by Google. Decreasing backlinks for your site who has been penalized is one thing i saw in getting out with it, sometimes a huge amount of link is the main reason why this thing happens.

Thanks for sharing, good and informative video.

The point of going too far in an attempt to optimize is the context. For example:


1. changing all css values to keyword-rich anchors
2. using all H tags 1-6
3. Adding a link from every keyword occurrence to a target url vs. just once per keyword occurrence
4. Adding footer links from each page (with similar shingles)
5. Using no-follow tags excessively
etc.



Proper optimization is effective, but if you go overboard where a common user is perplexed trying to navigate around all of the “enhancements”, then you have pushed too far… Search engines understand context, synonyms, internal links, co-citation and hundreds of other agreed upon / normalized patterns. If you are outside of those parameters, then you take a chance of sending a foreign signal, which could result in demotion if the areas are gray.

I made the mistake of linking from a new quick home sale site (county specific) to an existing quick house sale site (national). Thought that was Ok as Matt Cutts had said you can interlink between related sites.

The existing site plummeted down from p2/3 to p5/6 - looked like the 30 place drop I've read about; I removed the link and now (fingers crossed) it's gone back up again. A few days ago, however, the new site fell off the radar - sandbox??

What's strange is that all my customer's sites link back to my web design site and - fingers crossed - I've not had this penalty before.

thank for you sharing

Great Find KungFuSEO...I especially liked the video in the link. Those SEOMOZ guys are great resources.

The big problem with penalties is working out what's triggered them. Google don't make it clear and you can be left second-guessing as to the cause.

Yes, but being sincere to what you've done in the reconsideration request will help you *guess* it The rules are relatively simple, just ask yourself what you might have overdone.

Making a huge amount of backlink in a short time period will be cause of penalization. Decrease backlinks for your site and put down all work for site for some day after some time it will be back its place.

The rules might be simple but identifying which you may or may not have breached is not always, as anyone with a penalised site that's several thousand pages in size will testify.

Well, at least Webmasters and SEO's should know how things to be done just in case they were in the stage of penalization thing but the fact that we know what's inside the rules and what things should be avoided. I guess we should choose the right one next time.