My site is the only site on the web with legitimate definitions of slang terms and citations of their use and other data. My site offensivest.com is the only large-scale analysis of the vulgarity of text works - using data from the site. Until a couple years ago, it was the only slang thesaurus available without payment on the web. I invite you to check out similar sites to calibrate your sense of whether it’s low or high quality. For example, you could compare my site’s content, ads, and ranking to internetslang.com. https://internetslang.com/DBA-meaning-definition.asp Is representative of the site.
I don’t understand your saying that my site is a content farm. Almost every definition has been hand-edited by me. The citations are all blacked out. In terms of calibration, https://urbanthesaurus.org/ is another good site to look at. It takes its definitions directly from Urban Dictionary.
But fundamentally it boils down to: a Google employee looked it up and told me that there’s a manual penalty against my site.
Then why haven't you corrected the thin content problem? Your site is drowning in content farm structures and thin content.
> My site is the only site on the web with legitimate definitions of slang terms and citations of their use and other data.
What you're saying has nothing to do with the problem. Your pages do not have enough original content on them, they're suffering from an extreme shallow content penalty. If only 5-10% of the words on your pages are original, quality content and the rest is content farm structured words, you are going to get massively penalized for that.
> Almost every definition has been hand-edited by me. The citations are all blacked out. I don’t understand your saying that my site is a content farm.
I'm saying that Google has judged it to be a content farm based on how they rank content and how they look for mass repeating structures on a site's pages vs how much high quality original content is on each page. This isn't complex SEO, this is very, very simple to diagnose. I wasn't joking when I said it took all of 30 seconds to figure out the problem with your site.
If all you have on a given page is 30 to 50 words of original text (text you wrote by hand so to speak), you will not rank, you will not get much traffic. That's SEO 101. Most of your topic page layout consists of repeating structures, such as: the header, the footer, the map, share / tweet / email section, related words, how common is this slang, how vulgar is this slang, link to this slang. That's all of zero or negative value.
One more time: ~95% of your page structure is of zero value for SEO purposes, and the only value on the pages is a few dozen words of original text. It's not enough; it's not even remotely close to being enough. That needs to be hundreds of words ideally, at a minimum.
> But fundamentally it boils down to: a Google employee looked it up and told me that there’s a manual penalty against my site.
That's very clearly not the problem with your site. It's the extremely shallow/thin content stacked against the repeating content farm structures on every page.
Here, I've marked up a typical content page of yours, showing what's wrong very blatantly. It took about 30 seconds to diagnose the whole site based on the repeating content farm structures and thin content problems.
https://i.imgur.com/k5brlYr.png
That page maybe has 20 or 30 words of quality content on it. That will get you an extreme demotion from Google if you're running a whole site like that in a content farm structure.
Your site was very likely penalized due to low quality, shallow content. Google tagged it as being a content farm. No conspiracy is necessary, it's obvious why it's penalized. Any SEO expert would point out the countless problems in the first few minutes of a discussion with them.
I looked at numerous pages, all were of very low quality, and thin / shallow on content.
On one page I checked there were 471 words, most of which were repeating low value words or from low value segments of the page (eg the "Link to this slang definition" section). Google knows the page is thin on quality content, aka shallow. I found this to hold true across all the pages I checked.
On most of the pages I checked the most frequent non-common words were "definitions" and "include" - ie hyper low value content. Your typical page looks like it might have 50 or fewer words of quality non-repeating content (content unique to just that page, written by a human). That's hundreds of words shy of what it needs to be at an absolute minimum.
The pages all have repeating content farm structures (which were increasingly common 8-12 years ago) with shallow content in those areas of the page, which is something Google sought to clean up around the time you're claiming the penalty occurred, which makes perfect sense.
You built a content farm, with a lot of shallow content pages, Google dramatically changed how it treats those types of sites, and your site most likely got nuked because of it. If you build a content farm structured site, where all the pages have repeating segments and your offset of positive value only consists of dozens of words of quality text on each page, you stand zero chance of getting traffic. That started being true 8-10 years ago as Google updated its algorithms to target content farms, to wipe them out of existence. They killed a billion dollar site, eHow, circa 2010-2011 in the process:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EHow