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So I was just surprised by officially being one of the very few to be hit with the manual penalty from Google "unnatural links from your site." We run a clean ship or try to. Of all the possible penalties, this is the one most unlikely by far to occur. Well, it explains some issues we've had that have been impossible to overcome. We don't have a link exchange. Our entire directory has been deindexed from Google for almost 2 years because of Panda/Penguin - just to be 100% sure this didn't happen. We removed even links that went even to my own personal websites - which were a literal handful. We have 3 partners - who have nofollow links and are listed on a single page. So I'm wondering... does anyone have any reason to understand why we'd have this penalty and it would linger for such a long period of time? If you want to see strange things, try to look up our page rank on virtually any page, especially in the /gui de/ directory. Now the bizarre results of many months make sense. Hopefully one of my fellow SEOs with a fresh pair of eyes can take a look at this one. http://legal.nu/kc68

18 years ago I put up our first website at http://oz.vc/6  Traffic grew and our forums reached hundreds of thousands of posts, our website had a page rank of 6 and our forums and other content areas ranked 5-6, the others usually 4-6. Panda 2.2 came along and whacked it. No measures recommended by SEO experts and the Matt Cutts videos even made a dent, including some pretty severe measures that were supposed to make a difference. Bing and Yahoo traffic both grew since Panda 2.2 and only Google kept dropping every few updates without recovery. Several few weeks ago Google provides the ultimate whack. It seems every page other than the home page has either a PR of 0 or not generating any PR at all. Every +1 disappeared off of the site. Now three pages have +1 back and the entire guide section (hundreds of articles) are still missing all +1s. I discovered two scrapers, one of which was copying all of our forum posts and ranking a PR 2 for it (while we have a zero. They were taken down but I still can't imagine how this result could happen. I am going to have an RSS feed aggregator taken down that is ranking a 2 and knows we can't prevent them from taking our Wordress feeds and storing them (we use them for areas on the site.) How can Google provide us with a zero page rank and give obvious scrapers page rank? What should have been years worth of awesome rich added content and new features was wasted chasing Google ghosts. I've had two SEO people look at the site and none could point to any major issue that would explain what we've seen, especially the latest page rank death penalty. We haven't sold paid links. We have received no warnings from Google (nor should we have.) The large "thin" area you may see in a directory were removed entirely from Google (and made no difference and a drop in Google doing the "right" thing!) Most think we have been stuck for a very long time in the rare Google glitch. Would be interested in your insights.