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[WorldEscape]

Hello all

We are looking for any insight we can get as to why all (except 1) of our sites were effected very badly in the rankings by Google since the Panda updates.

Several of our sites londonescape.com dublinescape.com and prague, paris, florence, delhi, dubai and a few others (all escape.com urls) have had major drop in their rankings.

LondonEscape.net (now.com (changed after rank drop) ), was ranked between 4th & 6th but is now down around 400th and DelhiEscape.net and MunichEscape.com were both number 1 for several years for our main key words

We also had two Stay sites number 1 , AmsterdamStay and NewYorkstay both .com ranked number 1 for years , NewYork has dropped to 10th place so far the Amsterdam site has not been effected.

We are not really sure what we did wrong. MunichEscape and DelhiEcape should never have been page 1 sites ) just 5 pages and a click thru to main site WorldEscape) but we never did anything to make them number 1.

London, NewYork and Amsterdam sites have had regular new content added, all is checked to make sure its original.

**Since the rankings drop **

LondonEscape.com site

We have redirected the.net to the .com  url

Added a mountain of new articles and content

Redesigned the site / script

Got a fair few links  removed from sites, any with multiple links to us. A few I have not managed yet to get taken down.

So far no result in increased rankings.

We contacted Google but they informed us we have NOT had a manual ban imposed on us, we received NO mails from Google informing us we had done anything wrong.

We were hoping it would be a 6 month ban but we are way past that now.

Anyone any ideas ?

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[KeriMorgret]

Charles,

I took a look at the home page and two random pages of londonescape.com. All three had meta descriptions. Were you by chance referring to a different domain? Making that clear would help.

Rather than stating something is horrible, it's more helpful to state that it is difficult to use because a production description is in one place and the order button is on another page (an example from one of my own sites).

I'm looking at content pages from the main navigation of londonescape.com, such as Guest Information and Short Term Apartments, and see plenty of internal linking.

[WorldEscape]

Hello Charles.

Thanks for taking a look at londonescape.com , this is the correct site.

As far as I know, all our pages have meta descriptions.

Not sure what you mean by (a production description is in one place and the order button is on another page). Each property has it's own page and the order / book button is on the same page.

There is a fair bit of internal linking and all our content is 100% original text.

We have asked Google and got this reply

There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team.
Of course, there may be other issues with your site that affect your site's ranking. Google's computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users.
If you've experienced a change in ranking which you suspect may be more than a simple algorithm change, there are other things you may want to investigate as possible causes, such as a major change to your site's content, content management system, or server architecture. For example, a site may not rank well if your server stops serving pages to Googlebot, or if you've changed the URLs for a large portion of your site's pages. This article has a list of other potential reasons your site may not be doing well in search.
If you're still unable to resolve your issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team

We are in the process of removing links we suspect may be spammy.

Many of our article pages do rank very high in Google,  just rankings for our main keywords are in the 100's.

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[Brian-H]

http://www.londonescape.net has had a steady decline in backlinks since August 2012 so it might be that it was a slow hemorage of links.

Was there any reason to change from .net to .com? Did you trip an over optimisation penalty for london apartments as I see that you had over 50% of anchors to that term pointing at the homepage.

Can you find out when you suffered dramatic drops in your analytics as that will give an indication to the algorthym penalty you may have.

Did you follow the same backlinking and onsite strategy for each of the sites affected?

Have you been organising your own seo or have you had an agency do it for you?

[WorldEscape]

Hello Brian

Thanks for the coments

We have been removing links since the site went down in the rankings so that accounts for the slow hemorage of links

We thought having the .com would be better than the .net as was recommended by a SEO company we hired and then fired.

We had a links company 5 + years back get us links and that is how we have 50% links with same anchor, stupid we now know of course and could well be something to do with penalty.

Several of our other sites would be in the same link boat I guess and also went down the rankings but they had little content, so it is not surprising they went down.

We were never bothered with analytics as our sites were all top and were for years. The drop came after penguin update.  Over a few days the sites all went down.

[Brian-H]

When you say penguin update...which one? What date as penguin has had several updates so you need to be sure?

A lot of people "legitimately" over-optimised in bound anchor text as there was no penalty for it. In your case you have no site-wide links (from memory) that you can cull in one go and make a big difference in one go.

I think you need a full site audit first to identify the date that the penalty took place and then make a strategy to part grow yourself out of the penalty and part identify high affecting anchor texts but low value links and get them removed.

I can't remember when looking at your site several days ago if most links go to your homepage or deep pages. If they go to pages other than your homepage (and the penalty is confirmed as an over-optimisation penalty) then you could let those pages 404 and remake them elsewhere on the site.

There are plenty of people, myself included, who could work with you on this and I think Marcus has mentioned that he also does site audits and from reading on this is Marie also has experience of identifying penalties and taking corrective action. You may already have enough knowledge and experience to do this yourself but if not I think the first port of call would be a site audit and identification of the penalty.

[Dr-Pete]

Are your sites cross-linked at all (I'm not seeing anything obvious)? The cascade effect across all of them almost suggests they were either (1) seen as a link network, or (2) you're using the same link strategy across all of them.

I'd watch the keyword stuffing - your titles are pretty aggressive, and then you repeat those lists in the copy at the top and bottom of the page. It's borderline at best. I don't think it's enough to get multiple sites penalized, but it may not be helping you right now.

You've got a duplicate of the London Escape home-page floating out there in the index:

http://www.londonescape.com/index.php?option=com_wesearch&task=loginVIAFacebook

Might want to add rel=canonical to the home-page, just to sweep up things like that.

You're indexed and I'm able to get the site ranking on very targeted keywords (exact-match and fairly unique), but you fall off the map for everything else. That's definitely indicative of a link-based penalty.