Is the spam penalty forever even after removal

[bojon]

Is the spam penalty forever even after removal?

One of my clients discovered the alt tag and gave every image on her web page the exact same tag – her company name. She was #1 because she has a unique name. Now you can’t find her anywhere if you search specifically for her company. I looked at her web page and discovered and removed her accidental spam.

Is this situation forever or will she be back at the top again next time her site is indexed. How long do these penalties last or has she lost the ability to be found by people searching for her company forever?

What should I tell her?

Thanks

[ihelpyou]

Welcome to the forums bojon! :hi:

I highly doubt the site was penalized for a company name in alt tags.

Please research her logs, etc to find what the real problem may be. It's probably a simple case where the site was down at the time of the last Google crawl of it.

[bojon]

I don’t think that would be it.

If you search for her type of work and city she shows up in Google and when you hit the cashed you can see the recent changes she made.

Thanks for the help.

[Alan Perkins]

It sounds like her company name no longer appears as indexed text anywhere on her site...

[bojon]

I got rid of the spam.

Will she be indexex adain properly or is she screwed forever?

[Alan Perkins]

Originally posted by bojon
Will she be indexex adain properly Let me be clear, I don't think (as yet) that she has been penalised.

Possibly, all plain text references to the business name have been removed from the site. So the site is no longer coming up in searches for the business name.

If you post the URL we can check in more detail.

[bojon]

I would prefer to not post the url but thanks for the offer.

Her company name is in simple text on the page three times and in the title as well. All the plane text is still there. None of the text has been converted to images of text and the page title etc… is still the same.

She has about 60 images that she attached the same alt tag to and only about 100 actual words on the site.

You can still find her in Google and Yahoo if you type in her name but now she ranks very very low… below sites that do not have her name anywhere and sites that have her name mentioned as text only because it happens to be on a huge list of call signs of amateur ham radio stations in Germany and another personal page that someone put the letters together to form an acronym.

If you search for her profession and location she comes up right where she always did on the third or fourth page.

[Alan Perkins]

Originally posted by bojon
You can still find her in Google and Yahoo if you type in her name but now she ranks very very low If you find her in Google using her name, then click on the "Cached" link of her page, do you see her name highlighted on the page?

I've never heard of a penalty applied on a keyword basis, rather than a page or site basis ... that's not to say it can't happen, just that I've never heard of it. :)

[bojon]

Yes, the text is highlited.

It is the only site that has her name in the page title and only one with her name more than once in text on the page.

She was on top for her unique name in the title, email address link, page text etc.

Page that have links to her are above her now as well as obscure odball pages.

Pages that do not have her name anywhere on the page that only show up because she links to them are also above her.

[bojon]

I just discovered she has two identical page title meta tags.

I just removed the second one.

[Alan Perkins]

Sounds like a penalty, but hard to believe it's not across the board.

What PageRank does the page have?
Are the terms that she's still ranking well on at all competitive?

Assuming she is penalised, the answer to your question is no - the penalty will probably be lifted in the long run, once the offending spam is removed and an indeterminable time in purgatory has been served.

[Dan0]

If the page shows up in Google at all, it's not "banned." Since you indicate that you can see the cached version, I'd have to conclude that the page is still in Google's database.

If they have applied some kind of automatic penalty for something on the page, then they should find the corrected site on the next crawl and have it ranked correctly at the next update. I'd say end of February is the "worst case" scenario.

Sometimes screwy things happen with Google that can't be explained. This could also be one of those things.

[bojon]

She still ranks fairly well for the competitive search terms for professionals in her location but if you know her and search for her website using her name you will need to do some digging.

I’m just glad that she didn’t ruin her site name forever.

Thanks for all the help.

[Dan0]

If they still rank for everything except the words she stuffed into all the IMG tags, you're almost certainly looking at an automated filter. You've fixed it, so it's probably fixed at the end of February, if not at the end of this month.

[MakeMeTop]

>I've never heard of a penalty applied on a keyword basis..

Oh, yes. IMHO this has been in place since the September update when an attempt was made to prevent Google bombing. Sites which have a disproportionate number of links containing the same keywords got a penalty when you used those keywords in a search - but no penalty for other key phrases.

This has been eased slightly, but is still in place. For an example if I had a site called free-widgets.com and had a listing in yahoo and DMOZ and a couple of other sites with Free Widgets as the link text I would no longer come up on Google for that phrase. If a few of the other links said Get widgets here - then I would appear. What triggered the penalty appeared to be the percentage of links that had the same link text AND the competitive nature of the term - so only 100 results - no penalty but 100K results penalty.

I had this happen to me on a few sites!

Not saying that this is what happened here - but it may be worth looking at incoming links.

[foghorn]

I had a situation where a server went down for a night and it resulted in the following:

An older established site with lots of links coming in stayed at the same ranking - no difference.

A new site with few links coming in dropped like a rock in the rankings. However, it still showed up in google, just much further down.

Conclusion - it is possible that your server was down and it dropped in rank for a lot of key words but did not drop completely out of google. I assume your site, and mine, will go back up as google sorts it out