I think I have a penalty on my domain...

[Grumpy_Carl]

my domain is www.brighttights.com it is an affiliate marketing website in the niche of tights and lingerie. A few months back my traffic was pretty good, doing about 500 hits a day from product search terms only. After the panda updates I blocked all the product pages from google as they were duplicate content and I am now working on a program of seing for the category and homepages instead.  I am using much more generic, and high volume, keywords for these.

Several months later I seem to not only be down to 7 people a day on my website but i'm not even ranking for terms such as "bright tights". I used to be no1 for this. I have domain authority of 27 so it's not terrible, competitors on the first page range from 45 to 9.  This lack of ranking for the sites name/domain name term is leading me to wonder if I have a penalty on the site.

Any feedback would be gratefully received.

[Grumpy_Carl]

Sorry, related to the above...does the site seem slow to other users? I have moved it from a Netherland dedicated server to a UK VPS to try and see if that would help with the rankings in Google UK but all it seems to have done is slow the site down

[RyanKent]

Regarding the site speed, I use Alertra to check site speed from various points throughout the world. Your server responds in about 2.5 seconds in London. The page loads slowly because the site design is horrible. Your PageSpeed score is 20 which is the lowest I have ever seen or even heard of for a live site.

You do not presently rank in the top 50 for "bright tights" in Google.co.uk. Assuming you did not geographically target your site to another country, this would indicate a penalty.

Your home page has 64 validation errors, you have blocked Google from almost all the links on your home page, your page load speed is really bad, etc. There are many issues which need to be addressed in order for this site to rank properly.

[KeriMorgret]

Have you verified your site with Google Webmaster Tools and looked recently for any alerts about your site? Google will often tell you there if it has found something wrong, and you can get some more clues about what is happening to your site.

[Group16]

Google Analytics says that one of my client's load time is 4 seconds. Alertra says it is 1 second in the USA. I don't think Alertra is accurate.

[RyanKent]

Alertra is sharing the text / html load time. It is not loading images, videos, javascript, etc. which can take substantially longer to load. Alertra is an excellent, free tool which can help you understand if page speed issues are related to your server or your web design.

Also understand Alertra is a snapshot of how your site is performing at any individual moment. Site speeds vary greatly throughout the day. If you press the button once/minute, you will likely notice different results.

If your GA shows 4 seconds whereas Alertra shows 1 second, either there are optimization opportunities on your site, or your site offers a lot of images, or the discrepancy is due to random sampling. I have used the tool quite a lot and find it to be useful.