I don’t understand, Google has penalized my site dragonsteelmods.com saying it violates their quality guidelines. I have nofollow on 99.999999% of the links on the site just like they want, but apparently that’s not enough. What I don’t get is why Google won’t tell you exactly what you’re doing that violates the guidelines, you just have to guess.

I have a total of seven links that are not nofollow as far as I know. I use a plugin that adds nofollow to everything except what I manually change.

One of them leads back here to this site. – I guess I can’t link to myself?

One of them is the template designer – is it bad now to give the designer credit?

Two of them are paid text ads bought privately – I guess I can’t do that according to Google?

The last four are from the company Text Link Ads done automatically via a widget – I guess I have to remove them?

The site has been online since 2005 so there’s probably thousands of links, so seven out of thousands isn’t too bad I think.

 

I looked at their guidelines and I’m not violating anything.

This is from Google guidelines with my comments after them:

Quality guidelines – basic principles:

Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.  – I do this, it’s product reviews and tech news for users to read and find out more, that’s all it is, nothing more, nothing less.

Don’t deceive your users. – I don’t deceive my users, what’s there is what’s there, plain and simple

Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you, or to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?" – I don’t do any tricks, I don’t even know any tricks. I’ll happily explain to anyone all of this and anything they want.

Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging. Make your website stand out from others in your field. – I have reviews that other sites don’t have. Companies do value my opinion but apparently Google doesn’t, or at least that’s how it seems to me.

 

Quality guidelines – specific guidelines:

Avoid the following techniques:

Automatically generated content  – I do not do this

Participating in link schemes – I do not do this

Creating pages with little or no original content – I don’t do this – I have over 800 ORIGINAL reviews. It’s a tech site so the other content is tech news and press releases just like other tech sites do. If you’re going to punish me for doing this then you have to punish all the other tech sites as well. 

Cloaking – I don’t do this

Sneaky redirects – I don’t do this

Hidden text or links – I don’t do this

Doorway pages – I don’t do this

Scraped content – I don’t do this

Participating in affiliate programs without adding sufficient value – I don’t do this

Loading pages with irrelevant keywords – I don’t do this

Creating pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware – I don’t do this

Abusing rich snippets markup – I don’t do this

Sending automated queries to Google – I don’t do this

Engage in good practices like the following:

Monitoring your site for hacking and removing hacked content as soon as it appears – I do this

Preventing and removing user-generated spam on your site – I do this

 

So I’m confused, according to their own guidelines I don’t violate anything but yet I have a rank of zero now and they say I’m being de-listed and everything else they want to do to me..