Many people believe that their results drop in rankings because Google has penalised them, others believe that these penalties don`t exist and that a drop in rankings can be attributed to Google`s re-indexing. Both sides have valid points, as well as some arguable flaws in their arguments, however, it`s better to be safe than sorry so let`s just consider the possibility of Google penalties.
There have been reports of occasions where results have dropped drastically in a short space of time. Where once searches stood proudly on the first page, they can now only be found cowering in 31st place or lower, even a search for the domain name only produces results that appear at the top of the 4th page. Spooky I know, and it affects all the pages throughout the domain. This is what they refer to as the “-30” penalty, as sites tend to drop an average of 30 positions. Whether the reason for the drop was because of a penalty or a re-index, there is obviously something that Google doesn`t agree with on your site. If by any chance you are an optimist, the good news is this is seen as a relatively light penalty from Google, and can be overcome relatively quickly and easily by making the appropriate changes to the site and then re-submitting it to Google.
I recently referred a colleague to an article written about duplicate content and why it is not good practice to regurgitate old content onto your website. My colleague read the article but struggled to make sense of it all as the article was just too technical for someone who is just getting started in SEO. So I had to go through the article with him and break it down into a more a more understandable format. This blog entry is a dummy version of what we discussed.
