DISQUS

Sepp_Hasslberger · 6 months ago

It seems to me that it is a bit late for Google to come out with this possibility to ask for "reconsideration".

Might the recent coming on line of Microsoft's new search engine (www.bing.com) and the almost immediate jump in its popularity have something to do with Google relenting now?

Google's apparently widespread penalization of sites' search ranking seems to be coming back to haunt the (still) popular search engine.

RobinGood · 6 months ago

Hi Sepp,
as a matter of afct, Google has been offering this opportunity for quite
some time... I think it is about three years.

The recent coming online of Microsoft Bing is a no-news item. Just marketing
fanfare from Redmond, as what Bing offers for the time being is completely
unimpressive. A real flop for what I am concerned.

Google is also not relenting in any way. Quite the opposite. It is only
being somewhat more open and transparent in giving an option to those
publishers which have been hit by a manual or automatic penalization to fix
their stuff and to report back to Google HQ. I think this is a good thing.

Many people like you who have experienced decreases in traffic and loss of
visibility on certain articles or keywords tend to blame Google for those
issues nonetheless, in my experience, there is very little evidence that
Google acts against sites that do respect in full their guidelines and
recommendations. My experience is that given enough time and the following
of the steps listed in this article would allow just about any Google
penalization to be recovered in as little as a few days in the best cases.

For the record, I have been hit by a BIG Google penalization myself in 2007
(read all about it here: ) but I have got out of it in about a week by
following the steps the guys at Google Web Spam group have listed for us
here today. I have also seen several other cases of this happening, but in
each and every one it was indeed the site that did have problems that needed
to be fixed.

What I really don't like Sepp, is that the site owner needs to guess about
it. This SUCKS. And it gets people like you to think that Google is doing
something bad to your site to favor some of its partners or customers who
have greater power, reach or money. I strongly doubt that this is the case,
but I concur with you that if Google was decidely more transparent about
acknowledging when a site is under a penalization would be a very welcome
move, both for site owners, as well as for Google own reputation and
credibility.