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.