My domain does not come in the search results, what do I do?

[modifyed]

Hi,

I have a website called www.bollykings.com

It had a pretty solid rank on google for a number of keywords but 4-5 months back, it was badly affected by the Panda update. Now it comes nowhere. I have started updating and posting new articles on it since the last two months.

When I search for "bollykings" on Google.com, website does not come only in the first 40 results. What could this mean?

[zeepartner]

not ranking for you brand name always hints to penalization. you have built some fishy backlinks and i see many of them on sites that are:

• topically unrelated

• in foreign languages

• on forums (where often there are other spam comments, e.g. with the anchor text "viagra")

i would start by removing the forum spam, that's definitely a major reason to penalise your site.

[PhilNottingham]

Hi Prateek,

It's tricky to say definitively why you've lost all your ranking without spending some time with your analytics, but i've had a quick look through your site and link profile and i have a few thoughts - which it would probably be worth looking into further.

1. Your site doesn't have enough unique content on it, which may be causing a panda slap. - while i assume all of the blog articles are unique and written by you (they are on other sites on the web, but i think these sites have duplciated your creations)  the ads, the sparse design and the non-unique images don't indicate to Google that you're a valuable authoritative resource. - i would seek to redesign the site and look lessening the prevalence of the few ads you have,
2. You have an extremely dodgy looking link profile - some of your referring sites seem incomplete and spammy, you have tons of nofollow links from unrelated sources and lot of links from extremely questionable adult sites. I wouldn't be at all surprised if you are getting a penalty for these links or Google have deindexed the sites providing you these links - lessening your domain authority. I would recommend that you seek to clean up your link profile as best you can - especially the adult links.
3. Your site is a quite slow to load. - to fix this, I would initially look at browser caching and the size of your images

Thanks,

Phil

[modifyed]

Thanks for your help Phillip.

I know I have lot of bad links but the funny part is I don't even know how I got them. I've never really hired anyone to build links for my website. Is it possible a competitor spammed my website with bad links?

Is it possible to get these links removed? If so, how do I do that?

If not, do you think that building more links from better websites can nullify the effect of these bad links? An SEO agency I consulted told me it was best to move to another domain but I don't want to do that - this website is my baby. I don't want to ditch it..

[modifyed]

wow Phil, that's a really nice and accurate analysis you did of my website...

A. Yes, all the blog content is unique - it's been written by me.

B. It's difficult to get unique images but a lot of the images are totally unique - I made them myself in photoshop by merging other photos. I guess you are right, I should remove the three ads I have on my website..

C. How do I clean up my link profile? I didn't even create it. Is it possible to remove them from websites that you don't own - I highly doubt that. Should I focus on building good links and content instead?

Thanks a lot for helping me out man!

[PhilNottingham]

Hi Prateek - that's cool about the unique images! - good idea.

I think if you can fix the ads and sort out your design issues, you'll be in a much better place going forward.

Fixing your link profile is going to be a massive challenge. I'll be brutally honest, it's one of the worst ones i've seen in a long time. What you should do is contact the webmasters of all the questionable sites linking to you, asking them kindly to remove the links. If there's any specific pages that a lot of bad sites are linking to - then you should remove them, leaving a 404 error and then transfer the old content on a new URL. Once you have removed as many of the bad links as you can, I would make a list  of them and then send this to Google along with a re-inclusion request. If you've also smartened up your design and removed your ads - they should hopefully let you back in....but no promises i'm afraid.

All the best,

Phil

[zeepartner]

Hi Prateek

Wow, that's strange that someone should build those links without being hired! I understand if you don't want to change domain and I think that would be a rash move too. I would try and contact the webmasters of the worst links (i.e. from adult sites and the forums that have most spam comments) and ask them if they can remove them. that's going to be a lot of work, but it seems like the only way to get rid of those bad links if you haven't built them.

getting better quality links could definitely attenuate the effect of the bad links. but you will run the risk of getting more bad links, yet again! plus, it might become even more obvious to search engines that you are building links manually. so you've got to be really careful here and not build too many at a time and only go for really excellent quality links.