Small business sites banned by google. Please help.

[jarik]

Hi.

My 2 sites http://www.painterdublin.com and  http://www.tilers-dublin.com were banned by google update in November 2012.

Both were ranking fairly well in search results: painterdublin generating cca 600/month and tilers-dublin cca 300/month organic traffic from google. After update it is about 70% less.

Is there anyone willing to take a look at my pages and give me some advice about what to do to improve the situation?

thank you very much

[TomRayner]

First, can I ask if you received any message from Google in Webmaster tools?  I'm wondering whether you got an unnatural links warning.

At first glance, I think you may have received a Penguin/Over-optimisation penalty. Looking at the anchor text diversity in your link profile (http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?site=www.tilers-dublin.com) and (http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?site=www.painterdublin.com) the vast majority of your links come from anchor text heavy terms, like "painting dublin" and "tilers dublin".

Furthermore, it looks as though the majority of these links are coming from the footer from your group of websites and are site-wide.  After the Penguin update, this quickly became a big red flag.

My recommendations would be first to check what message you've received from Google.  After that, I would remove all of the footer links on your sites. I think you would be OK replacing these with a single link, on the homepage, to your websites - provided that you mark it as "nofollow".

Once that is done, I would file a reconsideration request.  I haven't checked many of your other backlinks, so it might be the case that you would need to remove any other spammy links you can find there.

[CMC-SD]

The sites have not been "banned" by Google. "Banned" suggests that they removed the sites from their index. If you search site:painterdublin.com, you'll see that's not the case.

What was the exact date of the traffic drop? Did you lose traffic from particular keywords, or from everything?

[MarieHaynes]

The key to finding out how to improve is to first find out why your sites were affected.

Can you determine the date on which your sites were affected?  There was no Penguin update in November.  There was a Panda update November 5 and November 21.  Panda is about on page quality.  If your drop happened immediately after one of those dates then I would look for duplicate content on your site.  A quick look shows me that your blog has content that also exists on other sites on the web.  Getting rid of that content can help.  If that is the issue then you should recover by the next Panda refresh although some sites take a few refreshes to recover.

Or, did you receive a notice in your webmaster tools of a manual warning?  If so then that's a whole other issue.

There are many other possibilites.  If these were new sites they could have been receiving a honeymoon boost and then been placed lower down on the SERPS.  Or, you could have a malware issue or a problem with robots.txt.

But really, if you can tag the date of your drop then that's half the battle.

[jarik]

Hi Tom. thank u very much for your help. No, I didnt receive any message in google webmaster regarding unnatural link building. And yes, I am aware of crosslinking my sites in footers, I will remove those links, I hope it helps.

Also I am wondering if content on my landing pages is ok regarding "keyword density". Do you have an idea about this?

thank you very much again

[jarik]

Hi CMC. thank you very much for your help. Now I know sites werent banned but penalized, thank u.

Now looking at my analytics for painterdublin.com exact date of the traffic drop is around 27th of september 2012. And I lost traffic from keywords like: painters dublin, painters and decorators dublin, dublin painters etc. which are my most important keywords.

There must be also some problem with my domain name, because I heard google was going after EMD's which "painterdublin.com" certainly is. What do you think?

thank you very much again

[jarik]

Hello Marie. thank you very much for your help.

Now looking at my analytics for painterdublin.com exact date of the traffic drop is around 27th of september 2012. (sorry for that November)

No, I didnt receive any message in google webmaster.

I am using EMD domain names painterdublin.com and tilers-dublin.com, I wonder if that is a problem too.

Also content of my landing pages is heavily optimized for those terms (painter dublin, tilers dublin), I wonder if I crossed the "googles line" with it.

What do u think Marie?

thank u very much again

[MarieHaynes]

The 27th of September narrows your list of possibilites down to two likely ones.  The 27th was a Panda update and the 28th was EMD.  Using an EMD domain name is not going to get you penalized, but it's possible that you were previously getting a lot of ranking benefit from having the keyword in your domain and now you have lost that benefit.

Panda affects sites with low quality.  Often there are issues with duplicate content (i.e. content that exists on other sites on the web) or thin content.

I would guess Panda is your issue, but I'd need to dig in much further to say so for sure.  For example, this article appears on your site and also on http://www.homeinsights.org/house-painting-cost/.  Duplication like this can cause Panda to affect you.