Question

Topic: SEO/SEM

Can Google Penalized Sites Have Index In Google

Posted by Anonymous on 10/20/2006 at 3:28 AM ET 125 Points
Hi all,

I came accross tis site www.vimo.com which has thousands of backlinks shown in yahoo! but none in google, and the PR is zero. Could the site be penalized? Cause I still find google has indexed most of its pages. Can penalized sites hav an index in google? Are there any problems if I link to this site ?

Thanks in advance
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RESPONSES

  • Posted by Shell Harris on 10/20/2006 at 9:23 AM Accepted
    Yes and this looks like exactly that scenario. We took on a client exhibitdeal.com that had the same problem. No rankings and you could not find them with an exact name search. They were cached for two months during the time we were working to get them ranked again.

    I must admit that I found nothing to incur this penalty during a cursory look at the site. The code looks good, no hidden text, no cloaking and the backlinks I checked were okay.
  • Posted by ReadCopy on 10/20/2006 at 3:57 PM Accepted
    Yeah, not in the Google index, its been around for a while so not in the Google sandbox!


    My guess is that someone has tried to get too many links too quickly and Google suspects a mass linking strategy (which isn't natural and hence suspect!).


  • Posted by ReadCopy on 10/21/2006 at 2:46 AM Member
    OK, done a little more checking, you are in the Google Index, just not a particularly well optimised site.

    If you want to talk about optimisation and give you a chance of getting in the Top 10 in Google, contact me offline or post a Project.

    Good Luck

    Andrew
  • Posted by MarcMacalua on 10/21/2006 at 3:08 PM Accepted
    The site in question is showing ok domain-wide links in Yahoo! and MSN. Google as a backlink checker isn't really the best tool out there.

    A snippet search on Google for "Healthia is now Vimo" however doesn't return anything and suggests a penalty or penalties. The Vimo.com site looks a lot like Healthia.com and the former may have been slapped a penalty because of this.

    To answer some of your questions:

    "Can penalized sites hav an index in google?"
    Yes, even penalized sites get crawled and indexed. As long as its an outright ban, they'll still show via the site: command.

    "Are there any problems if I link to this site?"
    I don't think one bad outbound link is a death sentence. Even Matt Cutts links to some pretty bad sites on his blog. It's your overall link profile (inbound/outbound) that counts. If you have just a bunch of untrusted backlinks, then you might be at risk by virtue of the bad neighborhood principle. I think the same is true for outbound links.


    Marc
  • Posted by MarcMacalua on 10/22/2006 at 2:39 AM Member
    Still on the topic of outbound linking to questionable sites... Googler Adam Lasnik had something relevant to say about it at WMW a few weeks back:

    "...be assured that we're not looking to penalize folks for a "bad" link here and there. Rather, our algorithms are tuned to look for patterns of "egregious" linking behavior... both on individual sites and in the aggregate."

    https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3101946.htm


    Marc
  • Posted by ReadCopy on 10/23/2006 at 2:08 AM Member
    Seriously talk to a SEO company or post a Project here, Vimo is in the index but as Marc suggests, there is some duplicate content which will penalise the newest domain.

    Write some original content and avoid keyword stuffing and everything should be OK.
  • Posted by excellira on 11/8/2006 at 12:59 PM Member
    I have not reviewed the site in question and I am posting this after the close but I thought that I should provide some input.

    G**gle has gone through a lot of changes and updates. We have seen sites with low PR go to 0 PR for a few months and when the next update occured the sites received a bump in PR. Example: One site had a PR 2 and after some minor work on our part the site went to a zero then bumped to a 3 which is holding (and will grow ;-).

    Also, G**gle uses a different PR when ranking pages than what you see on your toolbar. I have seen PR 0 sites beat PR 6 sites on rankings.

    A zero PR does not indicate penalization but does indicate a need for good links.

    A greyed toolbar PR indicator is bad.

    Lastly, G**gle does not show all the links. On the example site mentioned above the site had about 3500 links in Yah** and only 9 in Google. When the PR was bumped to 3 the backlinks dropped to 1. I wouldn't be surprised if G**gle does not do away with PR soon. They are a backlink oriented SE and they don't want to show SEOs and site owners how to trick them.

    Rankings are important but conversions are truly all that matter. Any campaign that is focused on rankings and not on improving the bottom line of the business is misdirected.
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