Until this happened to me, I had no idea there was such a thing. From what I've always read, and what I've always been told, Google either bans a domain or they don't. However, after receiving little to no traffic from Google on a damn well developed (if a do say so myself) domain, a partner of mine started asking questions. Somehow, he got the ear of the guy who heads up the web spam team at Google. For now, I'm not going to mention his name in this post, but a quick search or two and you'll figure out who I'm talking about.
It turns out there was a long standing penalty on the domain DVDs.com before we ever got a hold of it. It wasn't fully banned from the search index, but it wasn't getting traffic for any term that didn't contain the text dvds.com within it. It seems that Google was "suppressing" the results to our site.
So, again from what I'm told, this penalty has been lifted. Now, we're about three weeks after the fact and for the past 10 days or so we've stared to get some long-tail keyword traffic from Google. So now the question becomes How do we know if there is a Google penalty on a site? It's easy to identify a ban, because there are no search results found for a site:domainname.com search for that domain. And at least with a ban you can ask to get unbanned. But a penalty baffles me. Not only can you not identify it being there, you don't even know who to ask to remove it.
I launched DVDs.com on June 1st, 2008. By around mid-July I started questioning my ability to create a search engine friendly site (well, not really, but I was getting damn frustrated), because we were seeing traffic increases from MSN (of curse) and Yahoo, but nothing from Google.
I'd love to hear from anyone else that's gone trough the same thing. Then again, maybe you're going through it now and you don't even realize it.
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