Several testing domains containing lorem ipsum were de-indexed by Google. The goal of this test is to see what it takes to get a page back in the SERPs and if it can indeed be taken back.
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As many of you know, on November 15th, I lost many of my test sites due to Google deindexing them. The incidence was due to the Rhinoplasty Plano site was published in an article in the Search Engine Journal, 6 hours later, that site was deindexed and later that night, into the wee hours of the morning, about 20 of my test sites were also deindexed and this is one of them.
This is what the penalty looks like – sitewide matches manual action and pure spam, is what they label this as. What I first did, I decided I would go through the reconsideration process cause I thought that would be pretty interesting to do and pretty educational.
So the first thing was I told them these sites doesn’t rank for any keywords that anybody is optimizing for or bidding on in AdWords, therefore, this site cannot be spam by definition. Google did not appreciate this argument and almost immediately sent back a no, the spam problems persist. What was interesting about that is that the response literally took I think if it was 48 hours though, that was as much as it was.
I think it was showing that, in this process, they could see if you have actually done anything because nothing was done to the site. The reconsideration went and it came back fairly quickly.
The next thing I did was I removed all the pages from the site and left the hello world from WordPress when you first start a site and then submitted the reconsideration request saying hey, this can’t have any spam, it doesn’t have anything on it. That request took about a week, clearly there is something in my mind, if you have done something to the site, that would trigger some sort of review. That took a week and they said no.
Then what I did was I actually put a little content on them saying ok, now the site has no other pages, it is just the homepage and it has unique content on it. It cannot possibly violate any source of spam requirements at this point.
About another week goes by and also to make sure that the site actually got crawled, I submitted it to Search Console, just to make sure that it would be crawled. Yeah, they said no. They still denied the request. Google clearly hates this site. What I found interesting is that I know people do reconsideration requests and they come back so what I think we are seeing here is that this sites is literally being targeted.
It is on the naughty list and it would never get off the naughty list. Now, this is very overt and we can see this in this request but there are sites that gets penalized algorithmically and they probably get stuck on the same naughty list. You know when there is a site that you can see that there is obviously some sort of penalty going on with its content, links, and it is not a manual penalty but it is clearly being demoted because of some bad behavior and if you correct that behavior, it could be possible and it is easy to see that sometimes it might never recover.
It might get on to a certain list because of certain violations and they will always be punished by Google and I think we are seeing a very clear picture of that with this particular reconsideration requests that are repeatedly turned down when the site isn’t spam at all.
Can we pass a penalty to another site?
What we can do is we can take this penalized site and a couple of others and we can link out to another site and see if it actually picks up a penalty. That is great idea and we would put that one into action.