Here's the story: Guess its about over-optimizing and getting kicked in the butt for it My site is http://www.creditrelease.com and about a month and a half ago it was No.3 for the term "bad credit", wow..for a small-timer like me its a huge feat and it really got me thinking, howabout I optimize for "bad credit loan" then "bad credit loans" then "bad credit loans", so within about 2 weeks I built up so many (1-200) PR3-5 links for those keywords hoping for more $$$ since "bad credit" already gave me quite a nice amount. Well...guess what... My site dropped after 2 weeks being steady at No.3 to between 30-60 for about a month, now its at 300++ for "bad credit". I believe that my backlinks have been devalued to a very high degree because of this sudden burst of high quality links. So I guess that site is definately experiencing this "penalty", some people call it a -30 or -60 penalty. The smart guy in me say that I've been greedy and I should just let the site sit a little to get back a bit more trust in Google but the greedy part of me wants to optimize more. Should I try to sit it out and if so would it make any difference or should I start submitting low quality links ie. PR0-1 links with many many different anchors to try clear it up faster? Any advise or recommendation is welcomed. Thanks. Ryan
I would keep building, but pay attention where the links are coming from. Try to get trusted links instead of high PR links. And yes, I know those are very hard to get. Now that I had a look at your site, might want to change that template. It looks so RSSGM.
err...what what is RSSGM? I built it myself man..but I gotta admit...its rather ugly but thats when I just started web design ok...my second site! Anyway, I've got something to add, I've also signed up with Google Sitemaps and the wierd thing is that when I have a look at the "Links" tab I noticed that all the links were updated in the March - April period when my site was well an truely a PR2 with very limited links. Dunno if that could be a contributing factor or not...
I am just saying the site looks very auto generated and the content reads like it too: Reads like markov generated. Especially since I found this same content on about 50% of your subpages (duplicate content). Spend some time to write quality articles yourself and you will see your rankings improve.
Wow, never really thought it was the content man. Ok, guess the english kinda sucks, but really I did write it myself, guess I did it on Robot mode, 12am in the morning. Ok, To-Do-List: 1) Update content to sound less "robotish"
2) Make content of each page unique. 3) Change Template and Design to distinguish your site from auto generated sites Use CSS to move the template below the content while you are on it. 4) After you fixed everything, read this post: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-h...-and-an-example-from-the-field-of-real-estate 5) Make your site linkable and buy a high profile trusted link (yahoo dir, best of the web)
Where did you get the links from? Were they natural links? If you bought links or got them from directories then Google has most probably just devalued them all.
I agree, it needs a fresh, unique redesign. All I can say about the fall is focus on two keywords at most (or 1 keyphrase + 1 keyword) for example "debt" and "bad credit". Don't get greedy but still strive to improve.
Another tactic is to introduce other keyword-related links to other pages in your site (not just homepage). Imagine you are a SE spider. If all your inbound links have similar anchor text and they all go to the same page then wouldn't you think it was a bit manufactured?
I must admit that most of the links were actually from directories, however I think they're pretty good quality directories, mostly from people here actually. The funny thing is that I've always been a bit heavy on directories and its been quite good, I don't think creditrelease suffered much from devaluation coz the rest of my sites which pretty much have the same linking structure didn't move at all since the last update. I think I'll also try to put more focus on links to inner pages of my website to try un-bowl myself. Will also change up the keywords quite a bit more and will also try to improve the content so it looks more organic. I just want to see if this devaluation of link value will improve over time if I actually follow this "prescription". I'll report periodically to let you guys know the progress. Cheers.
Your Title tags are very spammy, see how they look in the index. Here. Look at the title of this page for example, it's no wonder you probably tripped a spam filter. Also you have got alot of pages with identical Description tags, these need to be made unique and matching each pages content.
Yah, its finally struck me when I read over the pages i does look a bit spammy doesn't it, anyway off to de-spam the pages, lets see how that goes. I got 1-200 Pr3-5 links mostly from directories and 3 ways link exchanges.
Hello guys, just an update 12 days after the first post. My site is currently out of the "penalty" or "sandbox" and is showing up very nicely for all the important keywords. I've basically taken the advise of the more senior members here: 1) Didn't change the design but made the content flow and look less spammy with much less keyword density 2) Got a few extra links to internal pages 3) Changed the Title tags to not include the website name AND the page name. Just display the page name so a keyword isn't repeated too many times Thats basically all I did and I'd just like to take this opportunity to thank the kind senior members here for their support and insight. You guys make digital point what it is! Thanks!
wow good stuff, looks like your back on the front page again for a very nice keyword....keep up the good work.