Site penalised in Google, any ideas why?

[flak]

Hi All,

I don’t normally post my problems on forums but I have a site I have been working on for several months with no success at all and its now sending me slightly insane.

www.noble-manhattan.com

They are penalised in Google but I cant find out why, I have made the site squeaky clean to the best of my abilities, has anyone else got any ideas?

The main key phrase is "life coach training"

At one stage I had got them back up to a ranking of 400ish (impressive huh?) but now they are back beyond 1000

Any suggestions greatly appreciated :)

[Spyware Remover]

Since you are ranked #4 on Yahoo, I would say you may be penalized because you might be linking to a "bad neighborhood" or link farm of some sorts. It's hard to say.

Just make sure that the anchor text in your links is for "life coach training".

AJ

[Dirkjan]

your website has a pagerank of 4. you dont have a penalty as far as I can say. its probably just wrongly optimised. Probably google just cant figure out what your site is about.

The content of your site isnt even that bad. Your link exchanges just probably are very NON relevant. Try to get links from the top 100 results when you search for your keywords 'life coach training'

Get your website here so Google can find out what you are about:
http://directory.google.com/Top/Health/Alternative/Coaching/Professional_Resources/

and uhm... on top of that, somehow you should get some luck ;) the links to and from your website just are the wrong ones somehow.

[flak]

Thanks for the replies, the site was linking to a couple of "bad neighbourhoods" a few months ago but I have cleaned all the outgoing links now.

I will check the relevance of the incoming links, I am in the process of getting listed in DMOZ but it’s a slow process

[hurricane_sh]

The index page is still cached by Google, it's definitely not penalized.

[flak]

For information I have contacted Google about this site and reveived the standard reply:

Hi,

Thank you for your note. As you may know, our search results change
regularly as we update our index. Normal changes you observe may include,
but are not limited to, addition of new sites, changes in the ranking of
existing sites, sites falling out of the index or getting dropped for
particular keywords, and fluctuation between old and new webpage content.

We realize these changes can be confusing. However, these processes are
completely automated and not indicative of wrong-doing or penalization of
individual sites. We currently include over four billion pages in our
index, and it is certainly our intent to represent the content of the
internet fairly and accurately.

While we cannot guarantee that any page will consistently appear in our
index or appear with a particular rank, we do offer guidelines for
maintaining a 'crawler-friendly' site. You can find these guidelines at
www google com/webmasters/guidelines.html. Following these
recommendations may increase the likelihood that your site will show up
consistently in the Google search results.

Regards,
The Google Team

[NewComputer]

What makes you think that your site is banned?

Usually banned sites show no cache, have no pagerank on the toolbar, their sites index page cannot be found doing a search for the index page.

Your site is still around for all of these. Is it because you don't rank well for your term? You have very little backlinks.... and no anchor text BL that I could find.

[flak]

I don’t think the site is banned but it is penalised. The site ranks well on Yahoo and the new MSN beta but not at all on Google. The traffic from Google took a nose dive in February.

I hadn’t mentioned this before just in case anyone was able to spot anything different, but I think this is the reason for the penalty...

The site owner had ringjohn.com do some seo that involved cloaked pages on the .co.uk domain (noble-manhattan.co.uk).

You can see an example of their work here: www1.chameleonnet.co.uk/content_management_software.html

In the Google cache there is a very different page that includes a link to noble www.google.co.uk/search?q=cache:9Af1IXmxgZYJ:www1.chameleonnet.co.uk/content_management_software.html+&hl=en

You need to disable javascript to see the cached page as they have a redirect script to stop people viewing it.

I had the cloaking on the .co.uk domain taken down a few months ago but i only found the chameleonnet.co.uk link yesterday.