I know we’ve probably paraphrased Hamlet enough in our blog titles, but it will probably always happen. And it’s a nice quote. But alas, I digress. A recent Webmaster Forums user stated that he has webmaster accounts for his website’s www.domain.com and domain.com. That’s not unusual, in fact, it’s actually quite prudent.

The problem came when this user was hit by a link penalty courtesy of Penguin 2.1. So after extensive cleaning and finally rectifying what was a fault in their previous link campaigns, they had their link penalty removed.

But here’s the weird part. The only had their link penalty removed for the www.domain.com whilst the penalty for the domain.com website remained. This has left the user quite discontent as after all their hard work and successful removal of any bad links, they still won’t register on Google for www.domain.com (their domain). Bad Luck.

The reason they won’t show is because the penalised domain.com is still pointing at the www.domain.com so passing on the penalty.

Have you heard of anything like this happening before?