Quote:
Originally Posted by arius
This has happened to me before, and is happening at a different online business again. For no apparent reason Google is penalizing our site:Testcountry.com. It must be a penalty since the site gets ample traffic from other search engines (Ask almost twice as Google Organic traffic , that should give you an idea), but there is definitely something.
There are couple very uncompetitive keywords the SERP is high, but for anything valuable it is 10+ pages later. Site is old, full of content, no black (even light gray) SEO. We just can not figure out.
In the office we are trying to figure out what should we do. This is so unfair that Google with the might and power that it gets from the millions of visitors (not to mention $billions in market cap) does not provide any means to small and medium size businesses and webmaster to communicate. After all they are supposedly the no-do evil, good guys but what are we going to do?
*Close the business (free)
*send legal papers to Google to ask give us an answer, ($10k)
*send creative and interesting presents to Google search team elite in Googleplex and beg for help and hope to get on somebody important's good side ($2k),
*give a national magazine ad and ask an answer ($25k)
*nothing (probably the most expensive one)
What would you do? If you are sure your site is penalized but can not get an answer to know what it is. We feel like a 1 year old that can not speak but do not understand why mommy & daddy is mad? |
I do see why you *feel* you are penalized, as you can't get high SERPs for your most coveted KWs. However, I would not even consider blaming Google. Google doesn't owe you anything and legal papers are a total waste or your time and money. So is bribery and the ad concept.
All your answers are, frankly, unreasonable, I think.
The answer is, in the same situation, I would reassess my
SEO and figure out what I am doing wrong. If you need some help with that, why not post a request in the Site Review forum.
I do see room for improvement for your on-site
SEO:
- For example, you use of h1 tags more than once on the home page and for words that are not targeted terms. Rather, use it once for your headline that has your most relevant keywords.
- You do not seem to link to your home page from sub pages with the target terms in anchor text. Maybe I am missing where you do that, but I would do it from every page.
- You also have a huge amount of code for your Shop by Cat links. I would recommend moving that off page as well, that is calling it from another file, if possible. Perhaps that is throwing off the keyword density of your page. Have you looked at what Google webmaster tools tells you about what it sees? Both in terms of content, and other information.
- Are you sure about your keyword targets? For example, I had a look at searched terms, and I didn't find 'home testing kits' to be a searched term. I did see *home drug testing kits* to be a searched term ... and I also see that it is a highly competitive term ... so you may have a lot to do to compete with other sites.
Of course, there may be something you are doing that Google doesn't like ... do you have any paid links? Or are you linking to questionable neighborhoods?
In any case, my advice: stop blaming Google and work on your site.
Cheers, MJ