Hiding Legitimate Content From Google Without Penalty?

[SmithyWhiffy]

Hi Around the time of the April/May 2012 penguin update we lost around 40% of traffic and ever since traffic has slowly been reduced to around 50% of what is was from last year from approx 1000 hits a day to under 500. I'm not convinced totally that penguin is to blame as link building has not been overdone especially when other companies who rank first page for "personalised gifts" have 100's of anchor links pointing back to there sites with this term as the link. I think our site may be hit due to accidental keyword stuffing! Basically when an order is placed the product page is updated with the last message to be engraved on the item, so for example if someone buys 10 wine glasses all personalised with "happy birthday mum, happy birthday dad, happy birthday son etc or if customers choose similar engraving then we have lots of combinations of the same words repeated. This information has increased the number of conversions as it gives customers ideas as what to engrave and I don't really want to remove it from the page. Could anyone advise me on what i need to do, is there a way of telling google to ignore this text, a way of hiding without being penalised? Any ideas greatly appreciated!

[irvingw]

you can hide the text in an iframe or something like that.

that is a long time to still be penalized, it could be keyword stuffing or some other unintentional technical issue. supply the URL if you want the site looked at

[SmithyWhiffy]

Thanks for your reply Irving I really appreciate your help, we moved from a home business to a premises with staff and overheads in March last year, traffic growing month on month then bang just my luck!

This is the URL www.keepitpersonal.co.uk

This is an example of one of the product pages, scroll down and check out "recent personalisation requests" - these are generated as sales come in.

http://www.keepitpersonal.co.uk/silver-personalised-noahs-ark-money-box-p-108.html

I have fixed duplicate content issues, using canonical tags and errors in webmaster tools and fixed technical issues but it just gets worse.

[SmithyWhiffy]

I've changed the title of the post and wondering how we go about adding tags or iframe to content.

[SmithyWhiffy]

Anyone?

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hello Mr. Smith (I love saying that)

Taking a look at the URL you provided: http://www.keepitpersonal.co.uk/silver-personalised-noahs-ark-money-box-p-108.html....

...I wouldn't guess that keyword stuffing is a cause for concern. In fact, I like the recent engravings box as it adds a nice touch to the information on the site. I also didn't find it spammy at all.

The design is a little "busy" and perhaps outdated - sometimes with edge cases this is enough to trigger a Panda update - especially if you have poor user engagement metrics, but I couldn't find any duplicate content and overall the site seems structurally sound.

I know you're hesitant to blame the link profile, but 80% of the time it's the culprit in these cases. The difference between what you and your competitors are doing is not always fair, but more based on what Google defines as "unnatural" at the moment.

I ran your URL through Remove'em link analyzer - http://www.removeem.com/ which loosely identified 285 "suspicious" links. You can do the same sort of analysis with these 2 other tools as well:

• http://tools.seogadget.co.uk/
• http://www.linkdetox.com/

Looking at the backlink profile in Open Site Explorer, we see a lot of comment signature links and directory listings, both types of links that were targeted by Penguin and/or over-optimization filters.

I'd check Google Webmaster Tools for any messages and/or errors. Even if you didn't get a link notice, you can file a reconsideration request to see if they will verify a penalty. Sometimes this will get you more information then you had before. In any case, it might be well worth it to do a complete link audit and cleanup, and even go through the disavow process if necessary.

Just my 2 cents. I know it's probably not the best news you want to hear, but I really like your site and want to see you succeed!