Have you been hit by a Google Penalty?

A lot has happened in the world of SEO lately…

Google are cracking down on paid links, and cracking down hard! Hundreds of thousands of webmasters have received warning messages in their Google Webmaster Tools accounts, stating that Google have “detected unnatural links”. This is often followed by ranking drops afterwards. Have you been affected?

Google have cracked down on link networks, both public link networks and privately owned link networks. Several major mainstream link networks have been completely de-indexed, impacting sites which had previously relied upon them for organic rankings. Have you been affected?

Google launched their infamous Panda update back in February 2011, but have since rolled out 10 updates, each one impacting more and more sites perceived as low quality by Google. If your organic traffic suddenly dropped one day, you may have fallen foul of the Panda update.

Diagnosing a drop in rankings is becoming a lot more difficult, and without an accurate diagnosis of the underlying problem, it is extremely difficult to take the corrective action which is going to get your sites traffic back quickly. Inside Online have a wealth of experience in diagnosing penalties, and getting sites ranking again, is a big problem, and time is money, so doesn't over-optimizatize your website.

Significant Google Changes: Is It The Over Optimization Filter?

Apr 24, 2012 • 8:57 am | (36) by Barry Schwartz | Filed Under Google PageRank & Algorithm Updates

 

I am seeing a significant uptick in complaints in the forums about downgrades and delistings of rankings in the past 12 hours or so. Most of them coming early this morning in the past hour or so and more and more reports coming in via the Google Webmaster Help forums.
I've spotted several threads, here are just a handful of them, one,two, three, four, five, six and many more.
The ongoing WebmasterWorld thread has an increase in activity from webmasters noticing fluctuations in Google. A senior member said, "having the biggest traffic morning in months. Since the smaller data set seems to be good for me, I wonder what that will bring....good or bad?" This is followed by a bunch of other complaints about increases and decreases in rankings.
This may be a Panda update, it may be a penalty, it may be a bug like last time or it may be the over optimization filter rolling out. I do not know but there is something going on.
What do you think?
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.
Update: Later today, Google has announced this update on the Google Search Blog.
Update: This is now named the Penguin Update.