What to do with a penalized site?

[macnpaul]

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I set this site up early Dec 08 and until a couple of months ago it was making a few sales everyday, although it's never going to make me rich I thought it had potential.

Whereas the site was on page 1 in google for a few keywords it suddenly dropped to page 4+ for every single keyword search including "Preschool Toys And Games"

I did sign up to a social bookmarking service which resulted in a number of low quality backlinks and that's what I think has caused the problem. Can someone have a look and let me know if they can see any other reasons why the site might have been penalized.

What would you do with the site? Would it be worth setting it up under a new domain?

The site: Preschool Toys And Games - Buy Preschool Toys, Read Toy Reviews

Paul

[ash]

What would you do with the site? Would it be worth setting it up under a new domain?

Personally i'd copy the site over to a new domain and use 301 redirects from the old domain to the new.

I've yet to see a 301 pass a penalty, so in theory your old rankings should return for the new domain. :tup

[macnpaul]

Thanks for that ash

Would be interested to know if anyone thinks the social bookmarking could have caused the penalty or if there's somethning else that I've done. Keep reading about OOP, maybe some of the pages in the 'toy reviews' section are over optimised?

[tijan]

Hi,
I dont think you have been penalized but your drop in traffic could have been as a result of activities from othersites that overtook you for your search terms. Your keywords may have been very competitive that you have to keep watch on it. I noticed that when google is catching new incoming links to my site, i tend to drop in ranking for the search terms for a couple of days specifically a week or 2 before i shoot up and higher again (this is not the case sometimes). If this have been persistent for more than 2 to 3 weeks, then the easiest solution is to update the specific pages with content rich keywords. Social bookmarking is no problem.
I should also ask if you have changed your Meta title?

[macnpaul]

Hi tijan,

I have probably changed the meta titles a few times, the site's been low in the serps for a couple of months, even for uncompetitive terms such as "Charlie And Lola Balancing Game" the site can't be found in Google till page 6! Take any of the keyword phrases in any of my page titles and the site won't be found until at least page 4 in Google


Seeing much thinner and lower quality sites easily outranking my site for everything.

[tijan]

I believe changing the Metatitle is like starting over. I would leave it and make it permanent unless i am sure i am ready and really starting over again. Google catch your backlinks faster than the new Metatitle.

Problems with your site:
Your Backlinks are Very Very weak. Of all the 247 backlinks to your site, your Keyword is Used less than 15 times.

Content:
a, Your site content is too small
b, Your Primary content and Meta description are partly duplicated. ( Why not rewrite and start with Preschool Toys And Games, get it mentioned at least twice in your Meta description.
c, Get more content for the site and use your Keyword twice (at least) and also randomise that keyword for the content. e.g Preschool games and toys, games and toys for preschool

Get more links to the homepage with the anchor Text: Preschool Toys And Games and nothing else.

Do all of these in 1 week and wait 2 to 3 weeks. I bet you'll be there on page 2 or 3

Regards,
Tijan Penpee

[macnpaul]

Thanks for the advice tijan it's appreciated.

As strange as it sounds I'm not actively trying to get the site ranking for Preschool Toys, or Preschool Toys and Games. I'm more interested in getting some of the pages down the left of the site and the ones in the 'toy reviews section' ranked higher as I thought it would be fairly easy.

Even taking on board the lack of content, (there's around 250-300 words on each page) and the lack of good backlinks I'd still expect the site to be doing much better, which is why I think it's been penalized.

[tijan]

Do you know that the most important page on your site is the homepage. The best way to do it is build the whole site around that keyword, it could also serve as a buttress for other pages. I would want ever page title start with my primary keyword, a kinda symbiosis relationship could help. e.g
"Pre school toys and games-bob the builder.."
"Pre school toys and games-brio train set..."
"Pre school toys and games-lego duplo..." e.c.t

Everyother page would be helping your authority page (index page), and it helps them in return.

You will do much better with lack of good backlinks if you are the only retailer of the products in question. You need to take into consideration that at least 268,000 pages are competing for a keyword you want to rank well for and that there is only 10 possible options for page 1, another 10 for page 2 and another 10 for page 3. Work out the probabilities and see the chances of you getting ranked on page 1. That result is very very low and even lower if you take into consideration that the top 10 pages have hundreads of backlinks. They are not strong competitors though, they are ranking higher than you because they have built a trust with the search engine and because there are no serious competitor for "whatever keyword it is" . SIte that have built trust like this get indexed fast and when they add a new product to their website, you'll likely see it in either of page 1 to 3. Its no magic, you can do it as well if you do what they do-build a stronger foundation to make a statement. You can beat them to it if you get some anchor text with the relevant keywords. (Be a serious competitor for what you want)

A good scenario to summarise:

For every PPC campaign i setup i bid 0.02p, if i setup an irrelevant campaign my QS shows up as Ok and i still bid 0.03p, this is not just because campaign 2 is so good but because i have built the trust with my previous numerous campaigns with QS as great to the same website. If i manage to have higher CTR my bid remain 0.03p because i am not getting serious competition and other factors. My position may suddenly drop from 1 to 5 or even lower even though my QS is still OK but because serious competitors steps in to claim their teritorry. google shuffle everything and put them where they are suppose to be.

Back to the organic page:

You need to claim your teritorry, and you can only do that by making a statement of claim which is your Offsite SEO.

[confuscius]

Even taking on board the lack of content, (there's around 250-300 words on each page) and the lack of good backlinks I'd still expect the site to be doing much better, which is why I think it's been penalized.

I am sorry to say that if you are expecting to rank for something then you are in for lots of surprises in the future. I doubt very much that your site has been penalized as what you are seeing is just normal Google behaviour of seeing early rankings and then being filtered down the rankings as Google puts your site in a wider perspective over time.

Moving your site to a new domain would be pointless if the content was the same - surely Google would just penalize you again? Follow the advice already given and make sure that the content of each and every page is relevant and try to stop your site falling down the listings by doing some active off site and relevant keyword based backlinking.

There is no instant way to success with Google. If there was then we'd all be overnight millionaires.

[macnpaul]

Thanks tijan & confuscius.

Of course nothing is guaranteed with Google, but if you follow basic onsite SEO to create a page based on a five word keyword phrase that has only around 8000 results in Google you'd expect to see the page somewhere in the first two pages of results.

When you still don't see the page until page 3 (only 323 results) when doing an exact search for that phrase and you're getting outranked by pages that are using the manufacturers description (duplicate content) or that mention the keyword once on the page, you start to think the site has been penalized.

I wouldn't class "Preschool Toys And Games" as a massively competitive keyword phrase, given that it's in the domain, title tag and mentioned a couple of times on the page surely it should appear before page five when doing an exact search for it.

[confuscius]

Do not forget that you can go too far on 'optimisation' too!

Take this example, 10 websites, 9 webmasters who have never heard of optimisation but they all accidentally include the keyword phrase once. Then there is the Guru Guy, the SEO guy who knows it all and he includes the phrase twice to outrank the other 9 based on keyword density BUT he neglected the fact that little old Google knows what constitutes the norm in this case - one keyword phrase per page and gives credit for it (the point being that Google has NOT penalised anyone) - guess who ends up in position 10 because they did some supposed optimisation?

Google is all about finding the tipping point and staying just below it. Try de-optimising what you have done and see what happens. Then become obsessed with testing, like a lot of us!

[findlite]

Seeing much thinner and lower quality sites easily outranking my site for everything.

Have you ever checked the inbound links though? A 3 page site site with 500 links all with decent anchor text will always kick the arse of a site with 100 links and a million pages!

[Brendon]

Heh, not if you get the internal linking right