Hi, Was wondering could someone tell me what might of happened. My site has been around for about 7 years, i have ranked really well for keywords such as computer training and computer training courses on my homepage -(alway in top 30) for computer training courses i was #3. http://www.learningsteps.com/index.php After last update my PR did not change however i see that search ranking has i.e. computer training courses was #3 now i cant find it, computer training keyword completed removed also. The funny think is one of the other sub pages of lesser importants has moved up its SERP's for the keyword computer training courses. I do quiet a bit of analysis and can see that traffic is down 35%, sales down also adsense, however in google tools not much has changed, same number of external and internal links etc. How can you tell if you have penalized for something, really cannot understand. Any help would be much appreciated. Kind Regards Fergal.
It sounds like you've suffered a penalty for the home page or the site as a whole. Do some research on the -30 penalty and the -950 (or "end of results") penalty. The end of results penalty seems to be automatic and you can fix it by changing your pages and linking structures. The -30 seems to be a manual penalty where you have to submit a reconsideration request to Google after you've fixed everything on your site that might be against Google's TOS.
For one, I think you should just use one homepage url. You have a lot of internal links pointing to http://www.learningsteps.com/index.php, but those should go to http://www.learningsteps.com/ instead. You should setup 301 redirects from http://www.learningsteps.com/index.php, http://learningsteps.com/index.php, http://learningsteps.com, etc. This ensures that all your link juice goes to your one homepage url. You may have possibly been penalized for buying links. I see that you have some sitewide sponsored links which Google may not like. You may need to work at building more quality links, but it may not be enough to overcome this penalty. Perhaps it is worthwhile to try contacting Google about the issue.
thanks for the replies, only sitewide links i have are to sites i own could this causing the problem.
Hi, Some thing happened to Google, all of the results are mixed for almost a month now When I search for a well known term and used to get a quality result I just get not-related result now, I think Google have a bug or some thing, hope it will get fixed..