I started a new hockey gear, price-comparison website this summer with a simple php script. The site was doing really well in the first month and I was able to get about 10,000 pages cached in google right away and traffic was coming in. But now it seems I've been penalized by Google. And I can't figure out why I really tried to do everything by the book and not do anything that would be considered "spammy" or black-hat. My site: www.chizeaphockey.com My traffic has dropped significantly for the last couple months. When you type in "Chizeap hockey" into Google where I should realistically be #1, I come up as the very LAST result. Realistically, no one would be searching for "chizeap hockey" however this just demonstrates that I've clearly been penalized. But why? The only thing I can think of that Google "wouldn't like" would be that I put my website in a bunch of those free link directories?? but even so, I don't see how you can be penalized for off-site SEO because if by putting a link on a bad website dropped your rankings, I could just go add all my competitors to bad websites. It looks like I've been hit with this "-30 rule" kind of thing and I would really appreciate anyone's two cents on why they think this might have happened? Something about my website must be breaking Google webmaster guidelines or something and I'm just not seeing it. Thanks in advance! Jason
Happens all the time. New sites get an initial boost then they get recrawled and dropped. Google likes new content so they will sometimes give a new site a boost in rankings. Consistant rankings are hard to maintain because everything is constantly changing. Google doesn't manually ban you, it's all about software and filters.
I'm having the same problem with one of my eCommerce websites... Hopefully we can find an answer here. lol