The dark side of Google – The SERP drop effect of a domain penalty

Written on June 13, 2007 by 14 Comments

Google's penalties are the dark side of running a website. Google's penalties cause such a drop in SERP that traffic goes down to almost nothing. There are several kinds of penalties that are speculated to be cause by various reasons. There's the -30 penalty, -950 penalty and others, and I was "fortunate" to experience one of those during April.

Look at the following Analytics stats :

You can see that the site experienced a massive drop in visitors which was all due to Google not sending any more traffic to the site. There was no warning, there was nothing special that happened, the site has been running for ages and then this suddenly hit. At first I thought it was just a glitch, since it happened on a Pagerank update, but as the update completed with the site preserving the original PR I already knew something was wrong.

It didn't have any of the -30/-950/etc. symptoms. After a month or so of discussing this with some SEO expert friends and giving up on their advice, I decided to head for the last resort. I changed domain names with a 301 redirect.

As you can see - it helped. After 2 days of quick indexing through sitemaps, some of the traffic was regained. Traffic hasn't been back to what it used to be probably due to domain name age and the time it takes for the engines to pick up a redirect from incoming links.

This means that there was some kind of a domain penalty on that domain. Why? I'll never know. Will this happen again? no one knows. Although I don't make anything from that site, this does make me think whether anybody can really rely financially on long-term online activities when something like this might hit you out of nowhere.

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  • http://pocketseo.com/ PocketSEO

    Very interesting... How big of a drop are you talking about?

  • fiLi

    Like you can see on the graph. We're talking about a 90% drop to almost no incoming traffic from Google.

  • http://pocketseo.com/ PocketSEO

    Oh, sorry, I meant general numbers... But no need to answer...

    I had a problem on a site once from 302 redirects to the home page. There were no 404 errors -- the hosting company had set the server to 302 redirect back to the home page instead. One day Google and MSN both suddenly killed the site in the SERPs, which I thought might have been because the engines had spidered some bad URLs and hit too many strange redirects. But I got it back to the front page on both search engines within 48 hours by immediately moving servers and making sure it sent correct 404 headers. I think the IP change triggered the search engines into thoroughly re-indexing, and... somehow it worked. I wonder if the domain name change set off a similar trigger.

    Great blog, BTW... have been reading for a couple of months.

  • fiLi

    Thanks ... :)

    It was from ~1000 unique to ~100, most of who were returning visitors. It's now back to ~600 (the line on the graph marks the number 1000).

    I actually do IP changes when I deal with The Great Firewall of China for some of my China related sites. A VPS/dedicated account with an IP range is essential.

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  • http://inday-stories.blogspot.com/2008/08/beijing-olympic-games-2008-medal-tally.html beijing olympic medal tally updates

    that's interesting. i just have a SERP drop problem today..

    thanks for the information.

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  • Cinevidia

    Thanks for the info. I saw a hit. Fixed a few things. Its better but not where it was.

  • http://malignantmesolthelioma.blogspot.com ryan

    I just had a huge drop in serp today. I dropped about 100 ranks from roughly 350-450. I have recently been adding backlinks to my site as a means to increase my site's ranking. Keep in mind that the site is around 2 weeks old. Yet I didn't purchase any links or do anything of that sort. Although I did submit to several online directories, some of which required a reciprocal link. Do any of you guys have any ideas as to why I suffered such a severe drop. Any ideas or insight would be greatly appreciated. THANKS

    • Fili

      Ryan - I wouldn't worry about that too much. If this persists, try cleaning up the act a bit and submitting a reconsideration through the Google Webmasters Central.

  • http://www.infoabtsettlements.com saad

    thankyou for your article, my site is experiening a same thing . so i have to buy a new domain? and do 301 redirect?

    • Fili

      Saad - you could. if it's a new domain then domain age matters, so it will take a while for that to kick in, but essentially - yes.

  • http://www.thehostinginsider.com Dave

    Won't google pick up on the 301 redirect and penalize your new domain?

    • Fili

      Dave - It should, but it won't. Try it, it works.