So, to make a long story short, I've been penalized by Google, but not banned, since October, 2007. I had ranked for months on the front page for my top 3 competitive terms. Suddenly, I dropped to the last 20 pages, or in some cases the last couple pages in the SERPS for those keywords. Certainly, this is a penalty. I've completely re-designed my site with the hope that I had some sort of hidden issue that I was not aware of. Well, 4 months after the re-design went live, still penalized. Thus, I submitted a re-inclusion request. No response for a few months now. That leads me to believe I'm missing something. Can anyone find anything on my site that could be seen as violating Google's quality guidelines? Thanks so much for your time! The url is: http://www.dental-plan-providers.com
make sure you check if any of the links that were link to you didn't stop linking back. Also, you have to know that your competitors could have more links or better content
Thanks, Bobby. I check periodically to ensure that my incoming links are still there. None of the biggies have changed, and in fact, since the penalty I have secured many more good links(a ton of so-so) links as well. I was ranking #3 on the 1st page for my key term for many months, so it would be unlikely that I became so uncompetitive that I dropped to the last few pages of the SERPS for that term. I appreciate the input.
you may want to check that your background color is different from your text color throughout your website. The colours seems close. Also your fonts seems small. I usually advise client try to hit at least 10 font size. 12 recommended
You already have a good suggesstion regarding font size and color schemes on your pages, please dont neglect it and I would say to hit keywords in a combinations of low and high profile mixing for all targeted pages. A balanced traffic and back links both works well for google increments. Best, Valuelinks.
Thanks guys/gals, I like the font size suggestion. I hadn't put too much thought into that one, but, but if nothing else it will help readability. Valuelinks, could you clarify this point: "A balanced traffic and back links both works well for google increments?" Thanks.
Give me some search terms with their old and new rankings and I'll have a deeper look. What I saw so far looked quite ok. What do you think it was, that caused the penalization?
Hey...would you please tell me my site also penalized by google. B'coz im also suffering from this type of problem. Thanks & Regards James
Hi Monfis, For the search terms: dental plans, discount dental plans, and affordable dental plans my homepage ranked 1st page, positions 2-5. However, now my homepage is literally on page 90+ for all of these search terms. There are instances where you'll find some subpages on the 60-70th page range. Since my homepage has the most incoming linkage using my key terms as the link text, I would expect that page to appear before subpages. Therefore, I think it is fair to say that this is some sort of penalty. Thanks for your help!
How old is the site, you have a PR 4 on home and blog/index page but all other pages show a grey bar N/A. No duplicated content issues either?
Hi Monfis, The site is 2 years old, so in my opinion old enough not to be fluctuating wildly based on age alone. In terms of duplicate content, it is possible that there are issues with some pages, but I've recently nofollowed the pages that I felt could be duplicate content. I think the fact that PR is not being passed to internal pages shows some internal linking issues which I need to clear up. See anything you'd change in that regard?
I have a similar penalty on one of my sites and I'm trying to find out whats the problem for over 1.5 years and still no result. I found out that anchor text may be the problem, the same anchor used too much. My homepage is filtered from the results, I rank for couple related long term keywords but for my main keywords my inner pages outrank homepage.
I spotted four possible issues. 1. dup content compared with dentalplans.com 2. More than 30 pages contain "discount dental plan/s" in the meta title (I'd change this, in two or three titles should be enough) 3. to much "discount, dental, plan" at least on home page, didn't look to far into the site) 4. Your discription meta tags are a bit short (I know they are not important for good rankings, but they can be responsible for bad rankings! If you don't want to rewrite them, better just delete them.) Try to write them in two sentences as close as possible to 200 caracters (not more) and finish them correct with a "."!
Some good points there. I'd agree the keyword density is a little heavy. Was looking at: http://www.dental-plan-providers.com/Search_Plans.html and you have the keyword "Dental Plan" in there 18 times (including links) !! There isnt that much content on that page though, so your density is high. I'd look at your competitors websites that are ranking well and see how they have built their sites in terms of links, density, etc.... Best of luck.
I appreciate the suggestions, everyone. I do agree that I need to work on lessening the keyword density a bit. I guess it'll just involve some guess-and-check since the other sites on page one of Google vary wildly in terms of keyword density for my targeted keywords. Thanks again!
Hi Freeman, I'll probably be making appropriate reductions in keyword density in the next few days...I'll keep you posted on the results...