Google penalty or what?

[dsmythe]

Hi everyone!

David here, thanks for your time in reading this post. Webproworld is a great resource that I have subscribed to for a while and it has been a great help to me in the past but I am frustrated now and need help! I must be doing something very wrong and I hope that to a more experienced eye it might be blatently obvious! If anyone has time to give me an opinion on the matter below it would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!

I manage the website http://www.rebatehomeloans.com.au and we are having major problems with Google search results. We rely (too heavily) on Google as our primary source of attracting business and changes affect us greatly.

Any feedback as to why our results have dropped off would be appreciated. I thought Google may have been penalising the site for something but not really sure what,...over use of keywords? replicated content on some pages? (see http://www.rebatehomeloans.com.au/sydney-mortgage-broker.htm and http://www.rebatehomeloans.com.au/melbourne-mortgage-broker.htm )
I sent an email to Google support re whether I was being penalised though and they have assured me that this is not the case. This doesn't make sense though as I am currently scoring about #60 or something for 'Sydney Mortgage Broker' and simlar terms when I was 2 or 3 about a week ago. On the 1st Google results page for 'sydney mortgage broker' there are sites listed with much more ambiguous references to the search term such as http://www.gumtree.com.au/cgi-bin/frame.pl?content_url=http%3A//www.gumtree.com.au/sydney/72/1010472.html

Background - We were consistently scoring in the top 5 results for search terms such as 'Sydney (Melbourne, Brisbane, Newcastle & Canberra)Mortgage Broker' up until about 1 or 2 weeks ago.
This was due to an optimisation of the website that included the use of such key phrases in page addresses, titles and content.
Also, terms such as mortgage repayment calculator, loan calculator, borrowing capacity, sydney home loans etc (and loads more)have scored well initially in the past when I introduced them and then seemed to just drop off the face of the earth.

I know that the site needs more incoming links from PR 4s or better and this is something that I am in the process of trying to rectify. Very time consuming applying for these manually though, are there any better methods or ideas?

NOT HAPPY!
:(

[cbp]

IMHO and if it was my site, I would get rid of everything that give the remote hint that you are participating in link exchanges.

Google wants to rank sites where that naturally should be based on a natural link popularity. They do not want to rank sites un-naturally higher than they deserve to be - You are sending some very poor 'quality signals' to Google re your link practices.

Also the link to world property links on the home is a bit dodgey - they meet some of the defnitions of being a link farm (eg they require a link back)...(they are not banned though) - personally, I would not take the risk of being associated with them as Google recommend against it.


We rely (too heavily) on Google as our primary source of attracting business and changes affect us greatly.


Any business model that depends on free advertising from a search engine, needs to change the business model.

Google have become much more sophisticated in their analysis of links - its not totally clear what is involved, but it al boils down to, how much of a risk to you want to take?

CBP

[dsmythe]

Thanks for your feedback cbp.

Excuse my ignorance but what does IMHO stand for?

I've deleted all references to links as you suggested.

Now what? Any ideas re the best way to get links.
Are any of these link building software programs recommended (always been suspicious of them)or do I just plod along manually?

Can anyone please also give me an opinion on my duplicated pages? Could they be a problem with Google?

[braknews]

Excuse my ignorance but what does IMHO stand for?I know it as In My Humble Opinion

[cbp]

There is nothing wrong with exchanging links (though I do not do it) just make it appears to Google that you are doing it for the benefit of your visitor.

I no exchange links - I just make sure that the quality of my sites are so damn good that people want to link to me. I do link to a lot of other sites (some link back to me), but it usually on a content page and the link is in the context of the content of that page.

CBP