Hi

My site seems to have been penalised in google. It still keeps a PR 5, and thousands of pages of my site are in the index, but when it comes to show in searches ... nothing. It would only show in searches if I write words that only appear on my site. Even writing the name of the site (3 words) wouldn't make it appear. It only appears if I search for the site's name using quotes "my site name" as there isn't any other site with those three words put in that order. So, it seems the site is still there but it is extremely difficoult that it would show up in search results. Before this happened I didn't have problem to appear in top rankings for my relevant keywords, but now I only get very little traffic from totally irrelevant searches ....

Does anyone know how to fix this problem? Does it last forever? Will it fix if I change to a new domain name and redirect the old one?

Thanks for your help.

HI dgnet,
People are quite willing to help, you'll need to add your url so someone can take a look.

However, it's usually safe to say that if you're penalized it won't just go away until you 'fix' it.

Hi again,

I have added the URL to my profile.

Some months ago I had a few inoccent "hidden links" on my main page. That could have caused my site to be penalised I suppose, but I removed them months ago and the site is still not appearing. Does anyone know if a domain name change can put me back in business?

Most likely it's in the Google Sandbox. This has happened to a lot of sites, and it's difficult to know exactly why a site gets in the sandbox.

From what I've been told, it's a 90 day penalty or "cooling off period". You're in the index, you are still getting spidered, but you don't rank anywhere for anything.

To get out of it, you need to start taking off any optimization that you've done and get more links to the site. There are no guarantees, though. I've had sites that I've worked on that I got out of the sandbox and then there are a few that I haven't been able to get out of the sandbox.

concer with bhartzer - wait and see - If you go for a new domain it still could take a long time to get up there...

Is the domain postitioning well on other search engines?

Well, I changed the domain and did 301 redirect from old domain to new one. After 24 hours I am back in business, ranking on first page for several relevant keywords. I hope it lasts ...

If you didn't change any of the page content, then theoretically the penalty (if any) should kick in again. I must say though that i've never seen a web site get ranked in a day. I guess Google isn't really considering it to be a "new" web site.

Wow, change the domain name and throw up the site and wallah, google puts you into first place again. hmmm, pretty weird stuff. Wonder if doing that for my problem domain would work. It's got the PR0 domain blues.