At a Google Office-hours party, John Mueller answered a question about how long it would take for Google to rearrange a website that disappeared and returned. Part of his answer revealed insights into a rare Google problem that prevented websites from ranking for any keywords, not even domain names.
John Mueller described it as an edge state, a state in between.
Background information about the old domain penalty
I have only encountered this situation a few times so rare that there is no name, so I call it a legacy domain penalty.
Legacy software is irreplaceable old software because too many people are using it. For this domain-related issue, this is a penalty that is attached to the domain but not displayed in Google Search Console, so it cannot be deleted.
There is no way to detect whether a domain is affected by this penalty, except that the site cannot rank anything, not even its own domain name.
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However, since Search Console does not record penalties, it is not possible to submit a reconsideration request because Search Console reports that there are no penalties.
Two years ago, John Mueller was punished by the Legacy Domain at a party during office hours. He asks the person who manages the site to pass the URL.
I monitored the URL for a few months, and after about a month and a half, the domain started to rank normally.
I wrote about this question here: The site cannot be ranked on Google: is this a penalty for legacy domains?
This punishment appeared around 2004 in the field of a marketer who was new to SEO. He does not know why his new website cannot be ranked.
On the surface, the site looks good because the Google toolbar shows that it has PageRank, which is indicated by the green bar on the toolbar.
The domain shows no signs of a penalty domain, that is, there is no PageRank, and it is displayed as a gray bar on the Google Toolbar instead of a normal green bar.
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Therefore, I and others reviewed it and determined that it had been used as a spam site by others before.
Contacted Google engineer Matt Cutts on behalf of the marketer, and Matt cancelled the penalty.
But Matt never explained what this strange punishment was, attached to the domain but did not appear as a punishment.
For many years, no Google employee has explained what this kind of punishment is, and this kind of punishment is so rare that many SEOs don’t even realize it.
So that mysterious domain-level punishment has been hidden in the mystery…until a few days ago.
John Mueller recently discussed a rare domain-level penalty, which sounds like it was observed in the past.
Website is in a state of punishment
John Mueller is answering a question about how long it will take for the domain to be unavailable to recover. He discussed temporary outages due to technical issues and site-wide updates where the site has undergone extensive changes.
Then he started talking about this “strange” penalty edge, which seemed to be an old error in Google’s algorithm.
The error is a reaction to spam activity on the domain, and according to John, it can last for many years.
This is consistent with the description of the mysterious legacy of punishment.
This is the description of John Mueller:
“Another very, very rare thing I see is that a website gets into a strange intermediate state in our system…
…At some point, our algorithm reviewed the website and found that it was absolutely terrible. Well, for whatever reason, these parts of the algorithm will take a long time to update again.
Sometimes this may be several years.
These are things I see from time to time, but they are very rare.
Therefore, the probability of any random website falling into it is quite low, but if you encounter difficulties and you really see that you are doing a lot of things and seem to have no effect, then please contact us and see if we have any Something that might be stuck.
However, I would like to say that at least it was a technical problem, and they resolved it quickly.
There are some weird things in the algorithm, and I want to say that this situation is much less now, especially if something happens…five years, ten years ago and your website got stuck in a weird situation. Determine the status, then it’s like reaching out to see if something strange is always worth it. “
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Symptoms of Ranking Limbo Penalty
The website that Mueller discussed two years ago could not rank for any keywords, or even his own domain name. The strange part of this situation is that the domain is once a month for several days, and its domain name can be ranked for several days at the bottom of the first page or the top of the second page. But after a few days, it will disappear without a trace.
The obvious sign of this hidden penalty is that it will not appear on Google Search Console, the site cannot rank any content including its own domain name, and the site has previously been used for spam purposes.
The previous usage of the domain can be verified through the free service provided by Archive.org. Archive.org saves website snapshots taken in previous months and years.
With luck, the previous state of the domain will be displayed.
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Many domain names have been used before. Therefore, it is a good idea to check whether the domain has been used before before registering and using it.
Citation:
Rare Google mistakes put websites on the edge of rankings
Watch Mueller discuss the rare ranking Limbo Penalty at 24:48 minutes:
