How to ask for forgiveness from the Google God?

[mof3kz]

Ok so maybe not ask for "forgiveness" because I am not sure what we did to get penalized.

I believe our site is being penalized 1. most of our usual keywords are not ranked in their usual placements in the search results. 2. some of our keywords are listing the wrong pages as search results and 3. our search results are landing on pages 8 or 9 on Google (not 2 or 3 as before).

This is an ecommerce site. How do we figure out what trigger the penalty (if at all) and how do we fix it so that we can get our ranking back (is that even possible)?

Please advise - much help is needed!

[Keszi]

Hi Mof3kz,

Whenever I had to deal with a similar situation to yours I was always checking what we have done, what did change in the past few weeks.

Even, if you have been working with some great link partners, take your time and write an email. Ask them if they have experienced a fluctuation lately in the search engines on their ranking.

Possible situations:

1. The major link partners have experienced big fluctuations, maybe their links profile had a bigger change and since you are connected it will in some way effect you too.

2. They didn't experience any fluctuations: this is when you ask yourself, ok, then what the hell happened here? Stay chill! try to get on-site ask yourself if you are optimizing the right way. Try to avoid any possible issue from your site, add better content if possible, check for crawlability, etc. etc.

3. The link partners tell you they have experienced some kind of fluctuations, but not big ones. Now this part is tricky. As we all know, search engines like Google are constantly changing the algorithms, trying out new filters to show up the most relevant content. Some filter (new or existing one) has triggered out your possible loss. It might be temporary, it might be something stable. In these cases I usually advice the same thing as @ the point 2.

I hope this resolves your situation! Good luck!

Gr.,

Istvan

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Mof3kz,

In my experience, a sudden drop like this is most likely an indication of a content problem on the site itself. The fact that you mention that this is an ecommerce site only furthers this opinion and if you are using the default, manufacturers product descriptions for your content then you could have been slightly filtered due to weak or duplicate content.

If you would like to post a URL I would be happy to take a look for you as I have some experience here, alternatively, you can message me the URL if it is sensitive.

I would suggest reading this post from Dr. Pete before you do anything else:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/fat-pandas-and-thin-content

You can also check the likelihood of content problems with the copyscape plagiarism tool:

http://www.copyscape.com/

Copyscape will show you pages on your site that similar to pages on other sites and it ranks them by likelihood to be causing a problem so again, it can be more evidence that you have been flagged as a weak result and are being buried in the deep, dark result pages.

With anything like this, it's hard to be completely sure and at best you can only be fairly confident about certain things. The job here is to identify any and all problems that MAY be causing the issue and start to work on the problems. From experience, content is often the best place to start so I sincerely hope this helps.

Post a link though, happy to take a look as I am sure many others here are two (with many eyes, you will get much valuable feedback).

Hope this helps!

Marcus

P.S. If you have a content type problem, there is no need to 'ask' for forgiveness, just get rid of the problems and the great and merciful google will cast down a blessing!

[mof3kz]

I thought there's no such thing as duplicate content on site penalty? We have products that have"sample" products. The sample product does have the sample content as it's parent product. But we have had this for years. Will message you. Thank you.