Hey guys, I am the owner of mdwholesale dot com. I need some help with my website from the fine and knowledgable folks here at DP forums. My site has always been #1 for its top keyword "headlight restoration." Now it is found between #40 and #60. This started a few days ago. It now has been replaced by sites that heavily (I mean heavily spam the serps for the top several spots - they spam thousands of automotive related forums, blogs and more and Google knows about this). I don't do any spamming at all and never have. If I search under my own keyword mdwholesale where I was always in the #1 spot I am now in the #40 range. There is no data or messages on google sitemaps from Google to alert as to what is going on. I don't know what happened with Google. We always add fresh, unique content every week which Google seems to love. It seems as though they have penalized my site (maybe the Google minus 30 or 40 penalty), but all of its pages are still indexed and the site still has PR4. I don't know what could be causing this? Last time something like this occured a competitor of ours in California somehow gained access to our site through Godaddy and added a ton of extra keywords to the homepage, disabled our shopping cart buttons and some other nonsense. I already checked the homepage for this and, unless it is something hidden, I could not find any such similar event. My site is around 5 years old and has always provided great unique content to include free tips and money saving ideas from my days of working in the automotive field. I never knew how nasty or how far some competitors on Google will go in my niche. One of our top competitors apparently just got called out by some lady on a auto related forum for spamming the forum and Google - yet they are still ranked #1 for "headlight cleaner" and #4 or so for "headlight restoration" (I found this by searching Google under their company name). Here is the link to that lively call out on Mustang forums dot com: http://www.mustangforums.com/m_5169461/mpage_1/key_/tm.htm I find its interesting that this forum has a link posted where the same people have a very bad rating at the BBB: http://www.bbbsoutheastflorida.org/...ReportPage_Expository.aspx?CompanyID=36000268 Yet they are still very highly ranked for their keywords and offer little in the way of any quality content and most of their links are from spamming forums, blogs and more. Regardless, the traffic to my website has been slashed in half and I contacted Google to see what was the problem so I could fix it and have received no helpful replies or anything (I even tried to ask kindly on a few Google blogs and no replies). Google webmaster tools still shows the pre penalty rankings. I'd appreciate any advice, Sincerely, Blogdude
Yeah, just to add my site was ranking really really well for highly competitive keywords, like #2 for the past 9-10 months and now im either on page 5 or page 7! Not sure, did something that google did not like!
Found out today it was my competitors again - they used a mirror default page that had x rated links on it and then linked to them in forums with anonymous posts. This brought on a minus 30 penalty. The false mirror default pages have been taken down and Google has been provided with this info along with that of the perps behind it. We'll be back up to normal in the rankings shortly. Gotta love crazy and malicious competitors.