My site now shows for its main keyword at position 897 when it used to appear at around position 5 I guess this is a penalty of some sorts but its a pretty big one dont you think? Its for my jobs site, what do you think could be the problem?
How many days have it lingered in that position? Sometimes it can be up and down and within the next few days return back to the original or even better positions. You can start worrying if it remains in this position for more than 3-5 days I guess.
yes.. you have been sand boxed.. sorry to hear.. try getting some organic backlinks and you're eventually going to get out.. or if you want out fast get some links on great high PR authority sites that usually don't offer links. The last option is hard to get but it will get you out quick. Maybe even improve serp from previous state.
well my main keyword would be "job centre" and yes it is that spelling since its a UK site and we spell things correctly over here The site was on the first page for about 6 weeks after it took me nearly a year to get it there. During those 6 weeks I didn't add any extra external links. It has now been way down for 15 days. It did this once before but only stayed down for 7 days before returning to the front page.
Best things is to keep getting links. Update might move site around but if it is down that far i think some links are devalued for your site
Well, what you need is a good linkback from a job-related website with high pagerank and good reliability.
I'll try and get some more quality links while also trying to figure out which links have been devalued as I have built many high PR links in the past...
Same thing happened to me a short while ago. I was ranking in the top 5 for many keywords for Google searches in many countries. Now, I rank nowhere. I won't double-post here - see here for a description of what happened. Time to get a shovel...
Its not the issue for this penalty but it doesn't help at all, fix that: <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;>charset=iso-8859-1" /> should be : <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
what does this have to do with ranking? and yes google is dong updates, ive lost ranking as well so lets hope it will go back to normal in a few days.
I think i have identified at least one possible reason for the penalty. According to Google Webmaster Tools, 99% of my links point towards the homepage of my site with many variations of keyword. I think my link building was far too focused on the homepage which is a no-no really isn't it? But it's strange that they still appear in webmaster tools. Do you think this could be a reason?
If you haven't notice anything strange in your webmaster central you shouldn't be worried about the lost ranking. I don't believe your site is been penalize by google. give some time. I think google is updating the PR at the moment so it could effect some SERPS. It takes sometime to get back to normal.
well i think you should keep making backlinks it will suddenly appear agin in top positions isnt it due to the hiphens(-) ? i think my eglish here is not good but try to understand what i am saying
My site is around 14 months old and no i cant really remember adding any backlinks, changing any of the on page factors or anything of the sorts in the month leading up to my fall.
Sorry to tell you but I think your site raised so many alarms in Google that somebody had to sand-box you just to shut down those alarms . Additionally, I think just getting more back-links and waiting will not help you at all until you correct at least the following problems: 1. Your title contains keyword "job centre" 3 times (with or without spaces). You have to admit, it looks a little bit suspicious. 2. Your meta keywords has: 4x"job centre" 9x"job" 7x"centre" 3. your meta description has "job" 3 times with density 14.3%. I would use it 2 times at most. 4. keyword density of "job" in your body text is 7.4%. Maybe you should lower it to 2% just to be safe until you get out of penalty and then increase it, but only if you really want to challenge your destiny. Otherwise stay between 2% and 3%. 5. In your H1 headline text you repeat "job" and "centre" 3 times each. Ones would be safe and 2 times would be risky. 3 times is suicide. 6. Following keywords you have in your meta keywords but you don't have it in your body text: "job centre vacancies", "job center", "job centre plus", "job center vacancies", "job centre search". This is very wrong. 7. Check your site with this tool http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/. It seems that you are linking to several bad neighborhood sites. In my opinion Google found your site as spam and filtered it. I think your only chance is correcting all the above, getting some more quality back links and submitting a request for reconsideration to Google. Looking at all the things you did wrong I don't think this penalty will just go away by itself. I didn't mean to sound offensive, I hope my post will point you to the right direction.
Keyword Density was a discussion of past .. And for your Kind Info .. Meta Keyword ... no search engine use this any more !! They just skip it ! I will suggest you to get some good quality backlinks in your internal pages as all links pointed to homepage dont look natural ..