Penguin update: Penalty caused from onsite issues or link profile?

[123craft]

Back in April before the Penguin update, our website home page ranked in the #1 position for several of our keywords and on page 1 for dozens of other keywords. But immediately after the Penguin update in April our rankings dropped immediately to below #100 for nearly all keywords. The sharp drop was obviously a penalty of some kind.

We worked on removing some bad back links that were questionable. Over the past 7 months many of the bad links have dropped off and our link profile is improving. Our rankings, however, have not improved at all. In Yahoo and Bing we remain strong and rank on page 1 for many of our keywords.

I joined SEOmoz because I’ve heard about their great tools and resources for SEO. The first thing I learned is that I had a lot of errors and warnings that need to be addressed and I’m optimistic that these items once addressed will get me out of that dreadful penalty box we’ve been in for 7 months now.

So with that quick summary of our SEO problems I have a few questions that I hope to get some direction on.

1. Crawl Diagnostics for my site in SEOmoz reports 7 errors and 19 warnings including missing meta description tags, temporary redirects, duplicate page content, duplicate page title, 4xx client error, and title element too long.

Could these errors and warnings be what has landed my website in some kind of penalty or filter?

2. A couple of the errors were duplicate page title and duplicate page content. So there appears to be a duplicate home page.

Here are the two pages:

howtomaketutus.com/

howtomaketutus.com/?p=home

They are the same page but it looks like Google is seeing it as duplicate content.

Do I need to do a 301 redirect in the .htaccess file? I’m not sure how that would work since they are the same page. If that is possible how would I go about doing that?

3. Finally based on what I’ve described above is it more likely that the penalty we are experiencing is because of onsite issues or because of our link profile?

We would really appreciate any help or direction anyone can offer on these issues.

Thanks

[Valarlf]

1. i don't think a couple of mistakes will not get you a penalty

2. Yes you need to use a redirect, you need to change your Apache. Htaccess

Try this code, I hope it helps:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^p=home$ [NC]
RewriteRule - howtomaketutus.com/ [R=301,L]

3. I think were the backlinks

[RyanKent]

immediately after the Penguin update in April our rankings dropped immediately to below #100 for nearly all keywords

based on what I’ve described above is it more likely that the penalty we are experiencing is because of onsite issues or because of our link profile?

Going by your statements, it is highly likely the issue is your rankings are being suppressed by Google due to the Penguin update.

You stated "immediately after the Penguin update" your rankings dropped. Penguin was introduced on April 24th. Did your rankings drop on April 25th or 26th?

Have you or any agent working on your behalf (employee, developer, link builder, "seo") added any links to your site prior to April 2012? More specifically: directory links, forum posts, blog comments, link exchanges, link wheels, etc?

If the answer to the above two questions are yes, the definitive diagnosis would be your site is hit by Penguin. In that case, the issue is your site's backlinks. There may be other issues impacting your site, but the first issue which needs to be addressed is the backlinks.

[SEO5Team]

James,

Watch out for Google's over optimization penalty as you try and recover your ranks. Review all of your on site optimization and make any fixes as necessary to reduce the keyword density.

[Debdulal]

I do not know but your website is not opening –

http://www.howtomaketutus.com/?p=home [showing error]
http://www.howtomaketutus.com/ [getting redirected to - http://www.howtomaketutus.com/?p=home]

_First fix this issue.

As you have not mentioned anything about receiving mail in Google Webmaster Tools account, I am assuming that you are hit by algorithm penalty. In that case, you need to get rid of as many spammy links coming from low quality article directories, directories, link pages and link networks. When it is done, you need to use Disavow Tools to include those spammy links where the link references still remain. You need to wait few weeks before you can start seeing any difference. _