A lot of your page ranking is determined by the age of your site. and that is something you have not mentioned - how old is your site? If the domain is less then about 8 months old, I would not expect stable rankings until your site is about 1 year old. For a new site, its normal for google to bounce your rankings around, its nothing to worry about. My wifes forum is about 5 - 6 months old and her ranking bounces all around. Sometimes her site is ranked #1 on her target keywords, sometimes I can not even find her site in google. Then a day or two later shes back on the first page. The same thing goes for my sons forum. Sometimes his site is on page one, then a couple of days later he is on page 50 or 60. then a few days later he his back on page 1 or page 2. My sons site is about 7 months old and has a page rank of 2 or 3. If your site is over 1 year old, then I would start to worry. If this is a new new domain and a new site, I would not worry. Just have a little patience.
I have the exact same problem. Ranked #1 for hundreds of keywords now I am on the 5th page. I also don't rank for the company name. Has anybody contacted google about this? Do you think it is a glitch in the update or penalized? My site did however go from pr 4 to pr 5. Any thoughts?
The same problem with me. I wasn't pennalyzed. But i my website's traffic dropped by almost 85%. From 630+ daily to about 90+ daily. The traffic drop started from January 10 to January 13 and still keeps on dropping. Hmmm... Am i the only one experiencing the thing?
If it's a new site then it might be bouncing up and down in the SERP's, however PM me your website URL and will take a look
In my case, even in PR6, my SERPS are really really bad.. I can find my site in 5th page even searching for my company's name! This PR increase means nothing to me right now..
What if I get a new domain and use the same content of my pennalyzed site? Do I have a risk of being "more pennalyzed" ?
Is your site back up in the rankings? I had the exact same problem with one my sites. My site is 2 1/2 years old, it just went from a PR 4 to a PR 5, it ranked #1 for hundreds of keywords and now it has the "Page 6" or "Minus 60" penalty. Did you do any massive link campaigns where you obtained a bunch of links with the same anchor text in a short period of time? That is what I am thinking caused my penalty. I am going to ask the webmasters to remove those links and then wait it out for a few weeks before I submit a reconsideration request.
Pennalyzed in Google. I must find out why. Penalized Not sure that you are as your site looked ok and as long as the links are relevant i dont see what the problem would be other then a google algo update. laterz malcolm
One of my sites dissapeared for it's company name. I beleive it was down to duplicate content - not because I was creating duplicte content but more down to filter and sorting options and other dynamically generated variables that Google was indexing. I strived to resolve this and now seems to be ok after a reconsideration request. Don't know if this applies to your site or not. I would also say that Whilst I doubt that your H2 tag were the culprit, requests with Google can take longer than one month for them to react. Hope you resolve your issue.
I'm another victim of the 40-60 penalty. Two of my sites, both more than 4 years old, lost all their rankings to page 4-6 fluctatuating daily about 5 spots... This started mid-november 2008 Company name also does not show up in first page. It's site wide, meaning all pages suffered the exact penalty on both sites (both on a different server). I did not do any significant link building the months prior, nor any significant onsite changes. There is no blackhat seo. The only thing I can think of is that they're both affiliate sites. I do have unique content though... Watching this thread to see if there's any news on this.
I agree that its not backlinks I once posted 22,000 on 1 day as a test with the same link text only problem. I beleive its some kind of quality filter