Google penalty :(

Samg86

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Aug 2, 2009
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I've had my main domain for about two years and over recent months the traffic has started to increase from the crappy <20/day (which has been up and down for the duration of the time) to 150/day and rising.

Aside from some light ScrapeBox commenting I haven't done much link building on the site for a while, although have been regularly adding content.

A couple of weeks ago i decided to build a new site and set up an addon domain. Once set up I Scrapeboxed about 150,000 links to the addon domain to see what happened.

A couple of days afterwards my main site has absolutely bombed, dropping off the radar on practically all terms. My PR has also dropped from 2 to 1. Is this as a result of the addon domain? Do all new domains need their own hosting?

I'm stumped as to what I can do now, the main site was hardly raking it in but was heading in the right direction. Is there anything I can do to bring it back from the dead? How long will the penalty last in your experience?

Thanks in advance for any advice on this.
 


Without more information (the sites involved) it's hard to say what happened. If I had to guess I would say that you either
1) had some cross over on the 150k links
2) have your sites linked together somehow
3) you're sharing the same IP and just spammed the shite out of Google and they decided to punch back.

If you search for your exact domain in Google - do you come up?
 
Hi Nebraska, thanks for your reply.

When you say 'some crossover on the 150k links', theres a decent chance that some of the link sites will be linking to both the main domain and the addon domain. Is this what you mean?

The sites are totally unrelated so don't share any links, although my htaccess file was dodgy for a couple of hours and was redirecting the addon domain to maindomain.com/addondomain.com so I suppose potentially there could be an association attributed by Google.

Both sites do show in google for site: searches so they havent been deindexed, just dropped off the map.

As my sites will be on the same IP could it be an IP based penalty? Any idea how long ill have to wait this out or what i should do in the meantime?

Thanks again.
 
My guess is you screwed something up setting up the addon domain and this has nothing to do with your links.


I'd check Google Webmaster Tools and make sure your .htaccess file isn't still screwing with googlebots ability to crawl your site.


I mean... when you say addon domain you mean you're just now hosting another domain on your server right?

You aren't talking about subdirectories or subdomains... correct?
 
Thanks for your input Hav3n.

The only thing i've changed in my .htaccess for the main domain is to add the following lines in order to ensure that the rules dont apply to the addon domain:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?addondomain\.com
RewriteRule .* - [L]

Google webmaster tools doesnt seem to show any crawl issues - only that a handful of comments on random blogs aren't directing properly.

The addon domain is exactly as you say - just a domain stored on the main domain server space. As i understand it though this is technically both a subdirectory and subdomain, inasmuch as addondomain.maindomain.com adn maindomain.com/addondomain.com are the same thing as addondomain.com (although neither should be referenced anywhere or linked to).

Hopefully that makes sense. Thanks for your help.
 
I think it's a coincidence. I have 20+ add on domains wih no problem with all of them being hit wih blackhat automation. You got sandboxes hard for your term. Do you still rank for other terms? Probably coincidence.
 
I just got the same slap but about 40 sites worth. It's been about a month and nothing has come back. I've tried various things, continue link building to some, adding content to others. Nothing has helped.

I'm starting to rebuild but with a lot more care this time.....

I know it sucks but try and swallow, then just move on! Learn from this and don't make the same mistake again.
 
I just got the same slap but about 40 sites worth. It's been about a month and nothing has come back. I've tried various things, continue link building to some, adding content to others. Nothing has helped.

Hey idsecure,

How do we know it's the "same slap":


I know it sucks but try and swallow, then just move on! Learn from this and don't make the same mistake again.

What can he learn from this?


I agree with thehobbster, just a coincidence.

Bompa
 
Were your sites cross linking because I believe G is really hating link farming which they can easily detect since they are a registrar.
 
My mistake, I'll rephrase, It was not the same slap I got a slap rather than the same slap and I don't think they are correlated.

My asking him to try and move on was encouragement to not give up!
 
If they are separate domains and not interlinked. Then they shouldn't be affecting one another. And you should look for other reasons why you lost your ranks and PR.

If they are on the same shared hosting (not as important as...) and interlinked (...this) and you scrapebox bombed one of the domains then yes it is possible that you got penalized.
 
If they are separate domains and not interlinked. Then they shouldn't be affecting one another. And you should look for other reasons why you lost your ranks and PR.

If they are on the same shared hosting (not as important as...) and interlinked (...this) and you scrapebox bombed one of the domains then yes it is possible that you got penalized.

This. An addon domain is completely different from a subdomain. I would also look for other reasons why your rankings tanked. However, it sounds like you interlinked all of your sites on the same hosting account/ip/nameservers/etc, SB'd it, and now your days of shitting in high cotton have disappeared.
 
The dropping of the PR means you need to work on your link building. Focus on quality links rather than quantity links and make sure that the links that leave the site are Nofollow so you don't share your PR with any other site.
 
I would prefer you to review Google Guidelines, Check specially content of website and reconsider site in Google Webmaster Tools