Post Matt Cutts

Dear Matt,

Thanks for your blog.
It is great how Google helped Trouw!
We are two prominent non-profit sex education sites in the Dutch language area and we have been seriously downgraded in Google's search results pages, causing a loss of 70% of visitors. This happened early February and has continued to this day. We are The Royal Dutch Society for sexual reform (NVSH) and the Flemish expert organisation on sexual health and HIV. (SENSOA). We presumed we had received a penalty, but we were never given any notification, either by e-mail or through Google webmaster console tools. We tried in several ways to inform Google, but to no avail. After much searching we thought that perhaps a porn bug which affected sites like comstockfilms , babeland and prettydumbthings in the USA at the end of 2006 had something to do with it. Especially after finding out that our sites were both hit at the same moment and continued to score high in the serp's on more sex (or porn) related terms.
Searching on for other possible causes, we discovered that the sensoa site had been hacked, while the nvsh site contained a large number of invisible links, owing to inadvertent errors in the use of Dreamweaver. We cleaned up our site and then submitted a reinclusion request.
This was over eight weeks ago. No change has occurred.
You describe a fair response from Google to a complaint by Trouw newspaper, who had a similar loss of pageviews. Trouw is a medium-sized paper on the internet , www.nvsh.nl is, or rather was for years, the most extensive and well-sought source of sexual information and help from people of all ranks of life in Holland, www.sensoa.be is the Belgian expert in sexual health and HIV. The writers on our sites are academics with a serious mission. One of our main activities is sex education. Teachers and students, schools and institutes mutually refer to us for information and assistance.
Why are important sites like these not getting an alert or e-mail from Google and why are the penalties still in effect, 8 weeks after a reinclusion request?

Yours,

Sensoa Belgie
Nederlandse Vereniging voor Seksuele Hervorming (NVSH)