Hi to all I have a client who is having trouble with her site. Back in October/November, she rapidly dropped off the face of Google to the point where she now no longer even ranks for her own business name. This problem is only in Google; she ranks just fine for her name and her business name in Bing and Yahoo. The site is indexed by Google, but it is at the point where even an exact match search for a blog post title won't return results from her site. I submitted a reconsideration request figuring that they had marked her as spam by mistake, but they told me that there were no penalties against the site, so there was nothing they could do. She was not participating in any kind of SEO or link building campaigns at the time when the deterioration happened and there were no major updates to the website. I've been through Google's list of things that may prevent a site appearing in Search Results (http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=34444). The site is indexed, it can be crawled and is crawled regularly, and it is cached. The site ranks for domain name, sitemap has been submitted, robots.txt file is fine, there are no meta tags blocking Google that I can see, and there are no canonicalisation issues I don't believe. I don't really know enough about development or SEO to go more in-depth than that. Guess who has two thumbs and is clueless? She has been operating her blog for a number of years now and all of her content is fresh, unique, and written by her. She had no problem with ranking for blog post titles before. The site is infinitegrowth.com.au Blog - infinitegrowth.com.au/blog For an example - recent post titled "Tips to overcome those ‘blank’ moments during a presentation" (http://infinitegrowth.com.au/blank-presentation-moments/) site: search returns result - indexed cache: search returns result - cached exact match search only returns results from Pinterest and Facebook where we've socially shared the blog post. Can anyone give me any clue as to what has happened? Why can't she appear correctly in results? I have been looking for answers for so long and getting nowhere! Any help and advice would be greatly appreciated.
I have to admit this page looks penalized to me. Even typing the title in quotes the page does not come up. How long has been this been going on for?
site: operator shows 319 pages - link: 1 Looks like a penalization. Have they been involved in "dodgy" link building?
Well, it's not a penalty, but an algorithmic demotion. There's a difference: a penalty is placed manually and requires resolving any problems and then a reconsideration request to get out of, i.e. a human, manual review. An algorithmic demotion is due to an update. You need to resolve the issues, but they are usually easier to sort out (contrary to the crying by many "SEOs" and "webmasters"). They do however normally require waiting for the next update. Just to note, though, that even once the problems are resolved, a rank is not always immediately going to be restored. However, in time rank will increase as more links and authority are earned. It looks like your client has created this problem for themselves due to duplicate content. I'm not saying they have ripped anyone off, but posted their content verbatim elsewhere (well a few minor word differences). For example: http://infinitegrowth.com.au/blank-presentation-moments/ Code (markup): Has been posted at: http://www.dynamicbusiness.com.au/blogs/how-to-avoid-going-blank-during-a-presentation-27112012.html Code (markup): There are some other pages that are partially copied, too. A lot of this will be out of your client's control, perhaps, but any word-for-word copies should be avoided. Where the clients words have been partially copied, you can always try requesting a link as a reference to the original source (if it doesn't exist). Where your client's words have been fully copied without her permission and the individual is refusing to remove the material, you can always try DMCA removal request (take time to fully understand how to do one, though). You should also check Google Webmaster Tools for HTML issues as this will highlight duplicate title and meta tags, for example. You mentioned October/November, which would coincide with a couple of Panda updates (which deals with page content issues, which this site is having). To throw a spanner in the works, though, there were Penguin and Page Layout updates, too. I can't imagine your client was impacted by Penguin, but possibly the Page Layout update: http://searchengineland.com/google-page-layout-algorithm-update-135847 Looking at the main page... well, it looks like a candidate, but then I don't know how the page looked back then, though. There is no harm in giving it a revamp, though. I also noticed some issues with site-speed, but this would only have a small impact on ranking, unlike what you're currently experiencing. Some caching, combining and minification would sort most of this out. After, you should try to run tests from different IPs around the world (A VPN and a page speed plugin for Chrome or Firefox will do the trick) as the server seems to have time-outs sometimes (at least I experienced them when I did the duplicate content check and when browsing it). You should also look in Google Webmaster Tools to see if there have been any crawl or HTML errors. This will also tell you the response times for page load, when GoogleBot is crawling. Anyway, that's what I would go through to start off with, if it was my site, and then re-evaluate the situation after. EDIT: As I mentioned earlier, there could be issues going on in relation to Panda and duplicate content. I just thought about this article. It's pretty heavy going if you're not into SEO, so I'm not saying ready it, but gives you an idea of how much of an issue it can be: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world
Nothing to worry. The site is not penalized. Use the Google web master tools to analyze the major errors of your site and correct them. It is the best method.