More details follow. But whether my metaphor is apt or not doesn't eliminate the fact that a Google employee informed me about the demotion.

The following is a FAQ taken from the page on my website about the demotion. It's written for a general audience.

Q: I just did a Google search and your site appeared in the first few results. Does that mean that the penalty has been removed?

A: No.

"Google Juice" is an informal term for how favorably Google views a website and pages on that website. There are a lot of factors that go into how much juice websites and pages earn.

Every time you do a search, Google's algorithms evaluate every page on the web to decide how relevant each page is to your query - how much Google Juice each of the pages has for your query. Then they show the search results, which are ordered by the amount of Google Juice each page has.

What the penalty does is subtract an amount of Google Juice from every page on this site. But whether that means we appear 1st, 2nd, or 307th in the search results depends on how much juice each of the other pages on the web have for your query.

You could think of it as a foot race. The penalty doesn't work as in: however you finish in the race, Google will drop you down by 9 places. It works as in: Google attaches a 20 pound weight to your foot, and whether that means you finish 1st or 307th depends on how good the other runners are.

So sometimes pages from this site appear towards the top of search results. That just means that those specific pages have enough Google Juice - and other pages on the web have so little Google Juice - that even with the penalty, we can appear towards the top. But overall, the penalty drags our pages down far enough that we would get about three times as many visitors if the penalty weren't in place.

That said, I agree that penalties/demotions seem to have a somewhat dampening effect, e.g. resulting in the previously unmodified rank but times 0.2 or whatever.

However, penalties should not last 13 years if the causes have been fixed. What did said Google employee tell you about your case?

edit: also, there is a way to submit a reconsideration request. Have you tried that?

True. I wanted the text to be immediately understandable by non-technical people. I'm on like revision 3,194 of the text. :) Any suggestions for improvement are welcome.

Also, there is a way to submit a reinclusion request. Have you tried that?

Yes, several times.

However, penalties should not last 13 years if the causes have been fixed.

They shouldn't. But in this case, it has lasted that long. It's a manual penalty turned on by a Google employee. The only way to get rid of the penalty is for them to (manually) turn it off.

What did said Google employee tell you about your case?

That there's nothing I can do.

If you're a Google employee, I'd love to discuss this with you! My email address is [email protected] .

I'm a little unclear on that. Matt specifically mentioned two active penalties.

Matt said that there was an automated penalty due to advertising on my site. Following this, I removed all advertising from the site. My site's ranking did not change, nor did traffic referred by Google searches. Why is that? If there's nothing I need to do for the site, why have those metrics not changed?

Matt also said that there was an automated Panda penalty against my site. Following this, I removed all citations from the site. My site's ranking did not change, nor did traffic referred by Google searches. Same questions as above: Why is that? If there's nothing I need to do for the site, why have those metrics not changed?

What did the prior manual penalty against my site that Matt mentioned have to do with Web Build Pages / Jim Boykin? I had never even heard of them. What specifically was that manual penalty? I have seen no evidence in ranking and in traffic referred by Google searches to ever indicate that this penalty existed. Furthermore, I was never informed by Google via any mechanism that there was a manual penalty against my site. Why is that?

Have Google employees ever been able to apply demotions, penalties, or any mechanism whatsoever to drop a website's positions in Google SERPs, in a way that the website owner is never made aware of it?

Has that ever been done to my site, The Online Slang Dictionary?

Thanks very much for your input.

> Have Google employees ever been able to apply demotions, penalties, or any mechanism whatsoever to drop a website's positions in Google SERPs, in a way that the website owner is never made aware of it?

should have read, in part,

> Have Google employees ever been able to manually apply...