Over the past year I have read Dave Naylor’s blog quite frequently, he is regarded very highly in the Search Marketing world and is arguably one of the most experienced search marketers out there. His blog has a large readership and many high profile SEMs comment on there, even Matt Cutts has been known to comment.
Recently Dave announced that he was closing down the blog due to a large Google penalty. Some said it could be a publicity thing, but it does look like a genuine threat.
The root of the problem appears to be the server was compromised and some cloaked links were placed on the site.
The scary thing is that it has taken Dave quite a lot of work to try and resolve what the problem maybe. He has tried to use Google’s Webmaster Tools to identify the issues, and he has tried contacting Google.
There was absolutely no help from Google what so ever. I think this is a serious cause for concern as a lot of people online manage everything themselves and if a guy with extensive experience with websites and Google can have such a hard time with a penalty then everyone else is pretty much screwed.
If Google provided even a small amount of feedback it would make life so much easier, letting someone know there is a penalty or issue with the site at least gives you a chance to fix it! Also they have all you incoming links, and internal links, maybe they should list your external links too? So then any cloaked links would be listed in WMTs. You would also be able to manage links a lot better, I am sure there are cases where people miss off a nofollow where they should be one. If Google listed all the links and their attributes we could identify problems so much easier.
