Google Advice Needed Please

[ben01]

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Hi,

I'm trying to work out a problem with one of our sites on Google....it seems to have been penalised.

The homepage PR is lower than the rest of the site, and it's rankings are very poor.

Any ideas? I've written to Google to ask why it's been penalised but I wondered what some of you guys make of it. I'm sure duplicate content is a problem, and not enough quality in-coming links but I'm not sure why there is a penalty.

Thanks in advance.

Ben

[Dynamoo]

Might you have some dodgy SEO going on?

For example, a search of references to your site shows a link from www.exclusivecarhire.co.uk - but when you actually visit the site, it's not there. However, the Google Cache shows it clearly.

Other than that, errors in the displays page rank seem to be common at the moment. I have the problem with one of my sites.

[ben01]

Hi Dynamoo,

Those links were there, but we've removed them for fear that it may be causing a problem. - That site is operated by us too, but on the same server etc, so was wondering if Google is penalising it because of this.

Thanks,

Ben

[Mogga]

Some thoughts

<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 5.0">


http://validator.w3.org/
Will give you some other ideas.


Google isn't disliking you

http://www.google.com/search?sourcei...perfectcars%22

[deano6410]

I dont have much time to fully look at this, but it seems that you just simply are not doing the SEO basics.

You seem to have gotten away with it up until now, but Google has finally caught on and is therefore ranking you as such.

Dont worry about your PR, its all over the place at the moment.

You have 142 backlinks: http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=lin...web-t380&x=wrt

You should be aiming at getting at least 1000 more. Also, your page titles are very poor. e.g on this page: http://www.perfectcars.co.uk/jagstype.htm your page is about the "Jaguar S Type V6 Diesel" but your page titlle is "perfect cars - hire perfection"

Also, I may be wrong here because coding is not my strong point, but when I was looking for your H1 tags, all i found was these:

width="4" height="4" class="hh1" /> &nbsp; </font></span></strong>


I may be wrong, but does the hh1 tag even exist? could this be a major typing error?

Basically your site is poorly optimised, sort this out, get more backlinks and wait 4 weeks. If things dont improve then we need to digg a little deeper.

[ben01]

Yes points noted, thanks. At this point I must add that I had nothing to do with the design / optimisation! Only just started to look after this domain.

Thanks for your input Mogga and Deano.

Ben

[Brendon]

The cross linking of Perfect Cars domains will make it look well dodgy... it looks like an SEO has been at this, and done some link building using 2001 techniques. Looks like all there is, is those links, and some scraper results. Spend the money, get a pro in. And clean up the code. The text is buried. I don't think there's a penalty, the sites SEO just sucks (sorry)

The site owner needs to pony up and get some real work done

>> class="hh1"

class is a CSS command. That's fine

[Dynamoo]

Well.. crosslinking isn't a bad thing. You'd naturally expect related sites to show a little crosslinking. It becomes a problem when there's a LARGE number of crosslinks. I was concerned because it looked like you might be cloaking, but if you've removed the links then perhaps not.

The PageRank on the Google toolbar is not always in sync with the PageRank Google uses to help calculate the SERPs. It usually lags behind the "real" value.

Deano and Brendon are bang on about the SEO, I think.

[deano6410]

The cross linking of Perfect Cars domains will make it look well dodgy

If used in moderation I find that cross linking can help, but if done by more than 2 or 3 sites it can lead to penalties. Just my opinion.

Step 1: sort out your page titles. Each page title should be unique. Sort those out and make sure they are well optimised.

Step 2: Add h1 and H2 tags.

Step 3: reduce the amount of cross linking

Step 4: Start working a few hours per day on link building.


The above should do the trick. Basically google has not got a clue what your pages are about and your link strength is poor.

[Brendon]

To clarify : yes, crosslinking can work well, up to a point. Then you are running a link farm, and get battered. Crosslinking sites owned by yourself will also basically lead to them being treated as internal links, which kills most of the value anyway.

What would worry me in this case is that such a high percentage of the links are from crosslinking sites. You have to consider the footprint from Googles perspective (and the other SEs to an extent... well Yahoo, anyway. MSN'll take any old crap), and the footprint currently says "SEO" to me

[deano6410]

Spot on Brendon.

Google is moving more and more towards "natural looking websites". Try and do everything in moderation and as naturally as possible. Getting a few backlinks from directories is not a problem, but if they make up 90% of all your links then it will set alarm bells ringing.

[Wardy]

I'm working hard(ish) on getting decent links in to a relatively new site I started this year. My decision on starting the site was that I wasn't goign to link out to other sites from this one for link exchanges. It's not been easy and a few links I have sorted by linking out from other sites I own but in the most part I am just trying to get 1 way links to my site with no link exhcnages required. Although this is harder work I do think that I have a few decent one way links to the site and also maybe 2 or 3 premium links that you can't buy.

Hopefully this will reap the long term rewards.

Cheers
Wardy

[deano6410]

Wardy,

Your technique is known by some as PR hording and rumours suggest that this can actually lead to small penalties in google.

I know I am repeating myself, but NATURAL is the key. Even the biggest sites on the net link to other websites. The only sites that I can think of that DONT link to other sites are spam sites

Do link swaps with the 100% relevent big players in your industry, try and get one ways from the others. Dont forget to mix up your anchor text

[Wardy]

Thanks for the reply deano, I'll look at gettign a few links going out then, maybe to some relevant WIKI pages and also industry regulators and other selected sites then.
I'd hoped google would see the links from some .gov sites and realise it isn't a spammy site

You are indeed probably right though, I've probably been a bit too careful with this site

Cheers
Wardy

[deano6410]

Wardy,

What industry are you in?

Dean