Greetings Google penalty fans, and welcome to another thrilling update on my all too frequent tangles with the Google algo cops!

So on March 30th I wrote a post complaining that once again I’d fallen victim to the whims of dear old Google and had been handed a right old royal slapping on my new mens undies site.  Refresh your memory here if you need to.

My site was so badly slapped it wasn’t ranking for it’s own name    The hunch I spoke of in that post proved to be correct.  As soon as I removed the plugin that was causing oodles of hidden text to be displayed on each and every page was removed I saw an immediate “bounce back” in organic traffic.

This Told Me A Few Things: -

• The featured content plugin was definately to blame – the other scraped content was still alive and kicking at that time.  NB – for users of this plugin I believe there are settings to prevent this, I’m just a lazy affiliate who never reads instructions.  What can I say?!
• The penalty might have been for the hidden text, but could also have been for dupe content.  Now it seems that sometimes when I talk about duplicate content penalties someone jumps up and tells me there’s “no such thing”.  However, I contend that there is… but not for single incidences of dupe content. Not even for the odd wee issue here and there.  In my experience, Google tolerates this to a certain extent and does what it says it will.  It chooses the “right” content to rank. However, should you go beyond what Google thinks of as acceptable you’ll soon find yourself winging your way to Google-blivion.   As with all things algo related there will be a threshold over which you really should not go! Worth bearing in mind.
• This penalty is taking a while to lift. Despite a return to search engine visibility, there are still many pages of my site affected.  You can see this from the gentle increase in search engine traffic over the months of April and May despite me not having added much at all in the way of content.  Pages are only ranking again once Google has been around and spidered them again.  Hence I deduce if you have had a penalty of this nature it is a dashed fine time to start posting fresh content like a madman and thinking up as many ways as possible to get Google respidering your entire site to speed up your recovery process.

I hope this update has helped.  As always, I didn’t like it but I certainly learned something from it!  Will it be the last time? Probably not, but I’ll tell you guys this here and now, I will NEVER let a Google penalty get the better of me.  Come hell or high water I will ALWAYS solve it.

I hate search engines getting the better of me

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