Wrong promotion of a website (spam, cloaking, hidden keywords, anchor spam etc) could bring to several forms of punishments from Google such as removal from search index, removal from top positions, or decrease of Google Pagerank.

 In my practice I witnessed a lot of situations when websites was punished by Google. Moreover, my own site www.manhattanservice.comwas punished when I sold advertising banners without adding “nofollow” tags to sponsored links. Most sites recovered later after mistakes was fixed.

Is Google Evil?

  My observations show that after Google punishment it takes 2-4 month (in average) to bring back trust and results. My own website www.manhattanservice.com lost Pagerank for selling links without “nofollow” tag and it took 4 month to get Pagerank 5 back.

  My friend who runs online store for kids lost all top positions on Google after he hired some company to create 10 000 backlinks. Google removed website from all top positions right after ”SEO” scammers added his link in 10 000 link farms. Google traffic dropped from 250 daily visitors to 10 visitors per month. I recommended him not to build any links and it took 3 month to bring past results back.

  Music store I manage dropped from 50 000 clicks from Google per month to 9000 (January, 2007). Google removed most web pages from index and decreased positions fro all keywords. I was confused and after discussion with my client found that back in 2001 his old SEO company created dozen websites to link only his pages. We closed this sites immediately and traffic came back to normal in less than 6 weeks.

  SEO blogger I met in blogosphere used to build hundreds backlinks on a daily basis using only ”website promotion” as anchor text. Google removed his site from serps for keyword spam. It took 2 month to fix situation.

Picture source: http://www.planet.nl/

 As you see, Google could be an evil but they can easily forgive website owners for past mistakes. Most webmasters know what they punished for and it is better to remove all hidden tricks, suspend unlimited link building strategies, improve website, and make your resource SEO friendly.