Out Of The Google -950 Penalty

How To Get Out Of The Google 950 Penalty

Once upon a time, a young boy created a Sitseeing attraction (site) for fun. The website grew and grew. The young boy was not an siteseeing optimization expert, and the little he knew, he used on his businesses. He ignored the optimization stuff for this fun site because it was working - it was making him happy and making his visitors happy as well. Then a G[oogle]iant tries to mess with his site and all his visitors were scared away. After never making any kind of changes to help enhance the site, he was faced with a dilema. After a few days of worrying about losing MORE than half his visitors (and revenues), he got out his slingshot and began to make changes to his site and get rid of the menace. A few days later the G[oogle]iant left as suddenly as he came. Although only a small percentage of the site was fixed, the problems had seemed to go away. The little boy wishes that the G[oogle]iant never comes back. However, the G[oogle] is still looming out there and has not finished terrorizing everyone.

The little boy found out later that the G[oogle]iant was set upon the land by the King himself to rid the kingdom of Internetia of Spamogres. Unfortunately for the little boy, the G[oogle]iant was unable to determine between the spamogres and the good guys. The little boy really appreciates the King's efforts of getting rid of the vermin, but would have like the King to take less drastic steps to do so, unless he knows it is going to work.

Future scenario #1: The little boy's site continues to get more popular, the land is rid of spamogres, dupers and all of the other evils in the land. The boy makes enough gold to retire and live in a castle of his own.

Future scenario #2: A new Giant comes back to menace the land. This time, the loss of visitors and continous fighting with the Giant made his tasks a lot less fun. He left his siteseeing attaction and never returned again.

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When I began www.popstarsplus.com two years ago, I never envisioned it getting this big. It will reach over 900,000 Unique Users (over 2 million hits) this month. The site began when I was bored working on my eCommerce sites such as www.GiftIdeasPlus.com. That old site is still around, but does not have nearly as many visitors. Pop Stars Plus began as a personal hobby site and I did what I thought was right on the site, not really ever worrying about search engine optimization (SEO). In fact, I remember when another site owner asked me for contacts to trade reciprocal links with other like sites. I told him that besides his, I only traded sites with three or four other places. I have a lot of links going out that I never asked for a reciprocal, but I have received many links coming in from other places that like my content. The fact that I have so many links on my pages is against standard SEO, but I never cared, because having and rating those outgoing links is part of my original content (the rankings and order, not the site). This is why people come, link, and come back.

Anyway . . . when I began PSP, I created the initial templates with the HTML knowledge I had, and with the very, very little SEO knowledge I happened to come across. The pages remained like this until now. There was never any reason to change them, until now. What is interesting, is that I knew very little about SEO, but managed to create a well ranking site. Google supposedly likes that. However, I was being penalized for my SEO ignorance and for the first time, needed to make changes to better optimize my site (through deoptmizing keywords).

Anyway, I am very glad the site is mostly back. My traffic is increasing to normal rates each day. There is only one very peculiar thing. One of the key phrases for a page is not working. My Ashley Tisdale page is still stuck in the 950s. It was one of the pages that has been de-optimized and has since been reindexed by Google, but the page was put into Google detention and has not been released. Some people at Webmaster world have suggested changing the title/description tags to fix the 950 problem - however, I do not see that as a problem. All my other pages are okay (at least the ones I tried).

Until next time . . .

Ian Ripley