Yes, most probably, but if I had a penalty I would be extremely cautious even with things which I normally don't care much about. He can get more back links and wait to see maybe no results or be proactive, do what you suggest and change his site to be perfectly clean and innocent and increase his chances to be back on front Google pages.
If you top in digg.com for a day or two, you will drop at the bottom a week after. Google is unpredictable. My solution: I stop checking keyword position: I go straight to Google Analytics.
Ok so here is my plan: Split each of the variations on job centre out into separate pages and clean up the title tags, meta tags and keyword density (to a lesser extent - i mean come on a site about jobs will contain the word job or jobs a lot). Make sure the H1 tags are less spammy and try to get a mention each of my meta keywords in the body of the text. As for your 7th point, I have checked what they claim to be bad neighbourhood sites and I can assure you that they are not. The tool you refer to suggested that gumtree.com was a bad neighbourhood site which is total rubbish. It is the UK equivalent of craiglist and have huge natural traffic from Google. Thanks for the advice and suggestions though.
Yes, but not in title. Once or twice would be enough. As far as body text is concerned, I understand your point, but again, you have a penalty and you can't be sure why. So you need to be a double suspicious and rigorous to everything. Or you can try correcting things one by one and spend a year or two figuring out what got you in place where you are now Of course, I would not like taking the responsibility telling you what to do. I just tried to point out, as many as I could, potential problems. If you are sure that something can't be a cause for your penalty, you should leave it. At the end if you decide to submit a reconsideration request to Google you have to convince them that you know exactly what did you do wrong, explain them why did you do it and convince them that you will never do it again. But at that point your site has to be 100% clean of spam. No problem, any time. I am curious to see how this will end. It is better to learn from other's bad experiences than your own
Could it be that the .gov site has made a complaint? I know you have a disclaimer at the top of your home page, but that in itself shows there could be confusion. Not trying to give you a hard time - just curious if that could be a cause.
You know, I never thought about that. It could be I suppose as I did see another site in position 898 that I have been competing with for a while and they have the same URL as me but without the -'s If that is the case then I am screwed, but I hope for my sake's it is not.
Sorry to ak a noob question but never heard of being "sanboxed" before. what does this mean and how do you find our if you have been? Thanks
Most of webmasters use term Sand-boxed in the meaning of being penalized by Google. Read the following article to learn how to determine if your site is penalized. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-handle-a-google-penalty-and-an-example-from-the-field-of-real-estate
Is it just me, or is anybody else tired of some "genius rocket scientist" getting on here giving out advice to "get backlinks from some quality high PR sites". If we all knew how to do that, don't you think we would have done it already? It's not like you can just go out to Wal-Mart and buy some backlinks from high PR sites. Oh, and they don't grow on trees either. It's sort of like saying, "Oh, you're in the doghouse? Well then what you need to do is go find a handful of diamonds and give them to your lady." Just absolutely frikkin BRILLIANT!
I would advice you to keep your URLs and keywords they rank for... private! To be on topic - try to build more deep links.
if not stated before, google has sandboxed you for a bit, best way to get out is like.. place the link to the post or site inside your forum link
I was just about to suggest the same, lol. Pedigree on your links page remove those unrelated outbounds, especially those directory links. Keep outbounds 100% relevant or use nofollow on any non-relevant links. You need to better interlink your internal pages together - there is no flow between them. create a HTML sitemap and also an XML sitemap. Attach the the XML sitemap to Google's webmaster tools, you might get some feedback on whats wrong. All the sites you are linking to, did you sell those links? You need better page titles with good short descriptions of what's on the page but also fix up the H1 titles using a different description from the title if that makes sense? Forget about building links for now, your site needs tweaking. The above is just for starters...
Actually, I was kidding. I was making fun of wantmomoney, 2 posts above me. The OP is penalized, not suffering from a lack of link juice. @pedigreechump6 - I didn't actually look at the site, so I cannot offer any suggestions on how to get unpenalized, but you might want to read both of this post thoroughly, including all of the comments. Matt Cutts chimed in a few times here: http://www.seo-scoop.com/2008/01/24/matt-cutts-why-am-i-still-being-punished/ It's a different penalty she was suffering from, where her PageRank got reduced, but that will give you an idea of how well you need to go through things. -Michael
I knew that Michael. I should have thrown in the wee to mark my sarcasm. The SEO scoop article is a very good pointer.
I had a look at the seo-scoop and some interesting stuff. Seems the spam team is on a mission to penalize paid posts. Even though some sites may not have paid links, their link juice may be coming from sites that have paid links. So they become COLLATERAL DAMAGE due to some sites being devalued on their food chain.