Google's penalty against The Online Slang Dictionary
Yuuuuuuup lol, under penalty for almost a decade now.In my case I had a forum (remember those!) in support of my software product.Bots would occasionally create accounts and post links to knockoff handbags and watches. I'd tolerate (and swiftly kill!) them because our users really loved having a place to meet. (This was back in 2011, ironically, reCAPCTAHA landed in 2012)Unbeknownst to me those links were part of a larger spam network where thousands of low-quality links pointed back to my site, presumably to those fake accounts(?).When the penalty hit the process of trying to figure out what the heck went wrong and trying to do something about it -- identical.In short, I've been penalized out of existence because of an obvious and in my humble opinion, easy to identify spam campaign. Sadly Google placed the cleanup burden on me, and try as I did nothing actually helped. The article's mention "hidden" penalties feels...accurate.I often tell folks when you perform a Google search you're given worse results than you deserve. My site and goodness knows how many others have been placed so far below the fold that if we're not outright killed, we never reach the users and potential we should.No biggie if the search market were more diverse, sadly, that is simply not the world we live in.