I wanted to share how I got off a google penalty
 

Since June of this year a website of mine was off the search engines. Couldn't find it unless I went to omitted results for the search terms and then it was in the 900's. It's called a -950 penalty. I resubmitted 3 times over the months and many changes and was able to get it into the 600's... that was it.

There are a few reasons for this but here is mine.

On my splash page which never had much relevant information I had a scroll box with deep text. The text was BS disclaimer type verbage but apparently google recently has issued penalties for this because their search engines are not reading text within scroll boxes. Apparently the algorithm penalizes for this due to the possibility the site is attempting to hide text.

I have done so many small and large changes to the site over the past six months and on the 11th of this month made the change to the splash page and eliminated the scroll box.

My site moved over 600 spots to #1 again.

I hope this may help some people out.

now you're going to have to go back to the google forum and appologize for telling them all to go fuck themselves :Oh crap

did you have an iframe or div with a scroll-bar?

Ahhh that is definitely very interesting

No...

just <tr>
<td width="297" height="239" align="center" valign="middle" bgcolor="#011B02"><textarea name="textarea" class="warnbox" id="textarea"> text that penalized </textarea></td>
</tr>

that sounds like the stupid shit that G does

In the mean time some site that was 0% relevant was in the number 1 spot

:2 cents:

no the second most relevant site most likely was number one in the interim.

Valuable info. Glad to see you got it resolved. Crazy that they did it in the first place but I guess I can kinda see their reasoning.

Good stuff. Also, based on a recent conversation, nasty penalties are handed out for people that fail to use robots.txt when dealing with no content directories, etc

not sure what's their beef with Textarea but you can encapsulate that same text into <div class="someclass">...text...</div> and have css rules make this div look like textarea with scroller. unless they dim whole page penalty-worthy, Div's shouldn't trigger their flags at all, textarea's too theoretically.

I did not know this.. Thank you :)

I have one site that is only beaten by a toplist and the wiki.. for my keyword.. then I have two other blogs that each time I do a redesign.. they go to page 1 for a few days.. then penalized.. Im wondering if I tweak their robots.txt.. if it'll boost their points a bit.

I've put many a website into 950, and pulled several out. I have to say, that the div in question would not be the issue (maybe what you had written inside it).

Generally the 950 is an 'over optimized' penalty. Or spamming of keyterms/volume search terms in the textwork/structure/backlink footprint.

I've made a post or 2 on this board about the 950 penalty. It's one of the worse.

When it was first introduced sites like 'audi.com' and 'money.msn.com' were tossed to the back of serps (950th), and there was quite an uproar.

When you were penalized,did you been completly penalized(where you wont able to find you site first on domain keyword)or you were just penalized on competitive keyword?

so basically you did a shitload of changes and assume that only the last one counts ?
you fail.

I can't imagine that was the reason.. I've websites with scroll boxes ranking normally, no big keywords but still...

I had the same 950 penalty. The site was a basic static HTML page and i only made one change and it sent it to the bowels of Google hell.

I made 2 changes in one day so it was either one or the other.

1) I stuffed a few extra keywords that were on my title tags, into the page.

2) I linked a few of those xtra keywords to pages within my site.

A week later, the site was in 950 hell. I removed everything i did and within about a week or two, the thing reappeared right back to normal in the serps.


Hope this helps.

Yup you're right. I definitively over optimized and that did it.

I was penalized for the main keywords. Not my site name which was the main reason MOST people who tried to help said I was not.

Thanks for the tip !