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I can no longer reply to this 3+ year old thread since I am not a "pro" member but figured I'd update this topic with an edit, since it is available. First -- It turned out that my analysis, observations and conclusions were correct. While there are a good amount of well intended and quality suggestions, none of the above made any difference and were not the crux of the matter. I cannot and won't disclose the issue here but it was remedied. Second - It was disappointing that, in spite of the fact that I cloaked my domain for the obvious purpose, others did not follow. Instead they used the domain so that it can be indexed by search engines. I hope they can and choose to edit their posts and that a respectful practice here can be maintained. My original response remains below. -------------------------------------------------------------- I do believe that any of these companies can fix your website site. I know that because I have worked with many of them and these are people who get results time and time again....I can tell you most likely they're going to charge you for such assessment it would be in the thousands most likely....Now normally and it's bad practice to guarantee anything in stringent opposition because Google can make a change overnight and nullify everything....I can tell you without a doubt that these guys can fix your site. My website isn't broken.  I do think you're making some assumptions. If SEO was pure cause and effect and my PR is zero everywhere because of something I did wrong per se, then all these SEO companies will be glad when I pay them after my PR returns to a 6.  You are overlooking one big possibility - that some sites just may fall inside the "acceptable margin of error" and nothing you can do will make a dent despite every SEO swearing it will. It may also be a mistake which does happen among a multitude of variables. Hence you have to carefully screen whom you work with and come as prepared as possible so that every dollar goes right into providing the highest ROI. Site owners are responsible for doing their part too. What's disturbing is that this such an extreme PR death penalty that on another very well known site everyone was swearing I MUST be selling links and Google knew it somehow... as that is the penalty. I'm not knocking your host just letting you know that anyone who specializes in WordPress and only WordPress knows a lot more about it than the guys who post everything... now hosted on Zippykid with dual CDN's F5 load balancers, private cloud architecture with a Cisco enterprise-level firewall along with the option for a free optimization every site is optimized by Net DNA or Google engineer designed around the Nginx Web server instead of Apache the amount of memory saved his incredible. It's clear you know a lot about the subject - truly. Ideally, I agree. I'll give it some thought about moving my two dedicated servers but that is a lot of work and $$$. Right now Google has me needlessly chasing a ghost since nobody can point a finger at why I've received a drastic result usually only reserved for the most serious offenders. When we solve that, perhaps we might have money to tinker with perfection. (When I say I have some understanding, I was directly involved in creating and running a site that had to handle 10 billion annual page views. Your suggestions are excellent for fine tuning.)  FTUm Webpagetest just reported that an article loads a page in 2.5 seconds first view and a mere second and a half for repeat. That's quite good. If somebody guarantees that they can fix something on your website in order to make it more search engine friendly that I could see a possible guarantee....I know that unless continuous work is done to keep Google happy essentially campaign then a ongoing relationship that keeps your website to where you are making a positive ROI otherwise it should really not worth it right? Read what you're writing to me here. In your enthusiasm, you keep saying how these companies will fix my problem. From my perspective, that's why on earth Google still has my entire site stuck at a PR 0. What you're saying now is that for a hefty fee of several thousand dollars, someone will fix errors on my site which include many cosmetic ones that I really don't care so much about if they will make a marginal difference. The real problem I have in choosing people to work with is that in this industry (and I'm not saying you), there is a tendency not to take a look at the problem and provide a reasonable estimate. It's about finding one or two items that are technically wrong and then hypothesize to a client why they could need to bill hundreds of work hours just to fix them all because anything is possible, Google obsesses about this and that, etc. I've been looking to invest in a long term relationship doing SEO and very importantly, SEM. But what I needed to know before I speak with anyone is whether (and why) nobody can even remotely identify the major area that resulted in the Google PR death penalty. If most said "I can see that the X area is the one where most of your problems are" then I'd be able to have much more confidence that hiring an SEO who agrees and works on remedying X will provide the best chances for the recovery. As of right now, all I'm hearing is that I need to spend thousands on an assessment and only then I might need to spend many more thousands on a crapshoot to see what works by tidying up everything. That's my hesitation. I'm writing to ask Matt Cutts if Google has a scholarship program, lol. I'll eventually choose one but the fact that there is no concensus at all on some good signs of how 17 years of work was reversed to PR 0 or less in one day is very disconcerting. Want to Improve your Website but don’t know where to Start? _https://yoast.com/hire-us/website-review/_ Regarding your robots.txt I used a tool that pulls any robot text on the website sometimes it's a more than one place for instance somebody can putt two plug-ins that each control the same function robots.txt in this case... I also think the site map is set up incorrectly it should just be simply one index sitemap_index.XML I don't know that you even need one for your form however that's something I would needs more time on. However I would ideally put into the same index. I appreciate all the info. You could be right and will need to rereview it all. FYI, all the robots.txt files are generated by (drum roll please) Joost's Wordpress SEO plugin by Yoast. It's an amazing tool. The reason for the multiple sitemaps is due to multiple blogs with each one generated by the tool. On the surface, I'm told that there is nothing wrong with that and Google specifically provides you with a tool to submit each sitemap you have. Thanks for the explanation about the robots.txt issue. I don't disagree with you there and am familiar with it. One problem also is that Google doesn't document when it provides data that they know is wrong or, more accurately phrased, not properly identified. For example, much of what you see was an attempt to rid myself of numerous 404s I'd see in Webmaster tools. After wasting months of time someone informed me of a Google rep who explained that Google doesn't necessarily crawl the 404s it reports that it crawled on a recent date. Why this isn't in documentation is beyond me but at least I stopped trying to mess with the robots.txt to try to stop the spider from reporting it spidered successfully non-existent directories. I will send you a private message and the choice is yours I would strongly suggest using one of the companies I suggested. you can also get Yoast to look over your site for $1100 and tell you what's wrong. Joost is awesome. I should have had him do it long ago when he offered me the review at a discount before everything totally exploded for them, lol. I still may contact him and had considered doing. However, I didn't want to waste his valuable time and my money on a report that might only provide him with time to point out all the obvious things I should have seen by expending just a modicum of time. I wanted to get the site cleaned up so that when I hired someone, he/she could use that same block of time to provide a much higher level and useful review. And once I get that high level review, I can use the remaining money on recurring work so that my SEO/SEM is doing the more results oriented work they want to be doing and I, as a client, will feel like I'm really getting good value for the money. As I said, even clients have to get their act together if they want to be able to honestly appraise the value of what their SEO consultant is doing for them. I will do this if you would like please feel free to call me tomorrow I have an appointment at 11 o'clock Eastern time I'm not looking to try to get business trust me however I feel that when people discuss things over the phone they tend to get worked out much faster than any other method. It's always awkward in this position so don't sweat it.  You've given a lot of your time here. I know there is some altruistic motive. There is nothing wrong with hoping to land a client as well who will be appreciative of generosity and willingness to be the first to help reassure that you know you can do the job and prove a little faith on your own time. Thanks again, much appreciated and will also respond to you off-forum as well.

Having disappeared, the homepage appeared immediately when I resubmitted it, then fell back in SERPs a little and is now achieving better SERPs than when it disappeared. I can't see any probs with the code / sitemap or anything. All in all rather confusing but (thankfully) resolved in a couple of minutes. Thanks for your brilliant feedback Thomas and for your help as well Marcus. Thanks to you, I'm well prepared should this problem hit one of my clients again

What strikes me is at the same time as your pages crawled fell off a cliff your page load time doubles.  What changed round about then that would have caused an increase in load times? If that was around the time you switched CDN, I'd be double and triple checking the new one was set up perfectly and is an improvement on cloudflare.  Did all your pages suddenly get markedly bigger, perhaps due to another plugin being added?  Pingdom tools is also great for picking apart load times. That would be where I'd start...

Having an SSL certificate won't remove your (not provided) keywords. As long as users are arriving from Google's HTTPS service, their keyword data will be stripped out, regardless of your own SSL status. There's no compelling SEO reason to have or not to have an SSL certificate - as Kevin points out below, it's really more a matter of user trust/data security. If users are providing you any kind of personal information (email, address, CC info, etc) you probably want an SSL certificate at least for the pages where you're collecting and sending that data. Your users will appreciate the extra security. One thing to watch out for is that http and https versions of the same page may be counted as duplicate content - so make sure that one redirects to the other.

Good discussion going on here! While I agree with the comments here that strong local businesses are still faring well in the SERPs, I, too, have noticed Google's bias towards Yelp and actually blogged about this recently. A few years ago, there was a similar situation going on with Merchant Circle. Practically every local search would bring up Merchant Circle listings, but it seems to me that MC has now been replaced by Yelp with similar results. I rarely see MC results on page one, but Yelp has become extremely dominant. This could change, of course, but for now, having a well-maintained Yelp profile is very important for most local businesses.

Hey Alex, personally, I would focus on getting your citations put together well with ideally unique descriptions that include your keywords. Don't worry too much about building links and certainly don't worry too much about anchor text. Go for the easy wins first and we are seeing great results in local search for existing sites with just some local branded links, solid on page optimisation and a sensible site structure, citations and well put together and optimised Google+ Local profile page. Put together a review strategy and try to get keywords and location in your reviews. Maybe do a small bit of AAA guest blogging on a relevant site with a relevant blog topic and get a link back. Work in keywords if you really want to but be sparse, varied and sensible. Links, links, links is not the way to do, do, do things any longer and especially not in local. Hope that helps! Marcus

I dont like to comment on specific details because I simply don't know what works and what doesn't. The best thing you can do is look at what is ranking and do your own version of that. If it's currently ranking well (and has done for a long time) there is a very chance that google likes it. But bear in mind that sites with very high link juice and brand awareness can get away with stuff that your brand won't be able to. If it was penguin you won't get a links warning. If you have been hit by panda or penguin a reconsideration request wont help. I would totally redesign your homepage. I don't like looking at it at work, it feel almost like a porn site. Plus the there are nearly 70 h2 headers which feels spammy and there is very little content.

No worries re: parrotting. If you look here in the Q&A and on things like Disqus, you'll find me repeating myself pretty often. Travel sites like yours can be really difficult. There are so many of them, most have virtually the same content, and it seems that most are extremely committed to link spam (and are often still succeeding with it). My gut instinct would be to try to come up with some really useful travel planning guides as a linkable asset like a PDF or maybe video. Some general guides for specific parts of the world (things like "How Not to Offend People in _____"), and maybe some for more specific locations. Then the tricky part is promoting that content in a non-spammy way so it will get shared, Liked, linked to, etc. That's a lot of work, but if Google ever drops the hammer on the travel site niche which is competitive and pretty spammy, you will have a better chance of survival.

I had the same experience on a few sites.  Ranked #1 for over a year, dropped same day as penguin, but bounced back the next day.

We're seeing some mixed messages from Google in this regard. They have suggested recently that links do have to be re-crawled to be disavowed. For an algorithmic penalty, that should be enough. For a manual penalty, even if the links are disavowed and re-crawled, Google still may require a reconsideration request. So, it can be a bit tricky. For reconsideration, someone is looking at the request, so we assume they take the disavow into account and try to adjust for that, but it may depend on the person and the situation. It's important that you thoroughly document what you've done in the reconsideration request. Don't just disavow a ton of stuff and then say "Hey, can we get back in?" They won't take that seriously, in most cases.

A couple of things to keep in mind: (1) Our authority metrics factor in link strength and try to model ranking ability, but they don't model things like spam factors. If you have a lot of links that look strong on the surface but have been devalued or penalized, we often won't catch that. We're working on spam modeling, but it's extremely complex. (2) As soon as you add "sydney" to the mix, this becomes as much a local SEO puzzle as an organic SEO puzzle. It's entirely possible that the competition is weaker on things like links or social signals, but has solid local ranking factors (like reviews and citations).

Is it possible for you to share the site so we can take a look at it? This question is very difficult to answer without being able to diagnose the issue, as it could be due to many different reasons, including internal / external links, on-page copy, rel canonical tags, robots meta tags, robots.txt file, URL structure, title tags, anchor text... etc.

This might be useful to you http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/webmaster-guidelines/

Another good answer, Lynn. Thanks a lot. I'll be sure to take on board the advice you've passed on!

Hi john, miriam and Linda, Thank you for responding. Now  everything make scene to me. I thought my site was De-indexed by penguin 2.0. Then some how i noticed Google page listing and you guys made that clear. feel so relived. Thank you Abith

I know its new website but as we all knoe Google is updating panda, EMD, Penguin algorithm but why they are not capable of understanding simple 301 redirect.

Hi continue optimizing and do not assume it will get back to where it was before. I see some of the site I optimize stuck in new positions and only a very slow movement upward. I guess it takes a lot of work to move up again

Lee Usually around a week or so, sometimes quicker in my experience, shouldn't be any longer than a week. Regards John

Thanks for the response. The badge would be a graphic with ALT text. Member's would post this badge on their own website as a way of showing they are a member (a bit like the old seomoz badge), so the websites will be varying degrees of quality. I imagine there would be similar ALT text penalties as there are anchor text penalties if there are too many focused on commercial keyword. So perhaps it's best if the images point to the member's profile page with their own brand name in the ALT text along with some target keywords. E.g. "Brand Name Carpenter in Location".

Hi Call Ring Talk, You have already received such awesome and helpful replies from the community, I will only add a bit here, some of which will be a summary of what others have written. Local rankings depend on a ton of different factors. Where you have a physical location, your best bet is typically to pursue local rankings. If you are a Service Area Business (SAB) you must pursue organic rankings for your service cities. Per your original question, the development of city landing pages on your website is one of the best tactics for achieving organic rankings for cities where you serve but where you have no physical location. For more information on the topic of city landing pages, I have been told that this piece has been really helpful to a ton of people: The Nitty Gritty of City Landing Pages If the whole concept of Local SEO is new to you, I recommend that you read through all of the articles on GetListed.org, which is a MOZ website. Here is the link to the Learning Center: https://getlisted.org/static/resources/ I further recommend that you follow Local Search Godfather, Mike Blumenthal, on a regular basis: blumenthals.com/blog And that you review the 2012 Local Search Ranking Factors report, though many things have changed in the past year. For many years running, this has been the premiere Local SEO industry survey: http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml One of the keys to successful Local SEO for any business is staying on top of the nearly-constant changes that happen in this area of marketing. Keep current and it will serve your business well!