Google penalising my site? Ranking now outside top 50

[devrox]

Hey there,

Was wondering if anyone could give me some advice/help on my current problems with my Google ranking.

I used to be on page one this time last year (still am on yahoo and bing) but Google has pushed me out of the top 50. Since then I built a new site on wordpress with new content but it hasn't made any real difference.

This is my site address: www.elvisimpersonator4u.co.uk

I also have a separate blog here: www.thisiselvis.tv

The blog did have some duplicate writing on it which I removed a few months back but it still hasn't improved my Google ranking. Would a 301 redirect fix this problem properly?

I've done quite a lot of SEO on several pages on the new site to try and improve it but no luck so far. In fact I hope I haven't over optimised! No tools seem to indicate this though.

I have no messages in webmaster tools so there's no obvious penalty, my web hosts keep saying I just need to buy more link builds and content writing from them but I've already done a lot of this and it's made no discernible difference.

If someone could have a look and give me some advice I would be most grateful!

Thanks,
Jim

[trickshotric]

I can't see any reason why you would have a link penalty so it must be something else.

You do have one immediately obvious issue on your site. 95% of the text is an image so it cannot be read by Google. You have to fix this!

[devrox]

Hey Richard,

Thanks for your response, the text is highlight-able as I've tried copying and pasting it into word and can do so and edit the text, should I be formatting it differently though? Is google not reading the main paragraphs regardless?

I have a couple of images this is true with text on the main page but that's not a major portion of the writing.

Cheers,
Jim

[William.Lau]

It would be best to let us know what search term you are referring to. Also would help if you know exactly when this dropped, was it sudden or gradually?

[mjmorse]

Jim,

What Richard said is 100% accurate, when I view your website with CSS, Javascript, and cookies disabled the majority of the important text on your homepage is lost.  Your header is an image, "Special package deals" section is an image, your endorsements are in an image, your list that starts with "don't be cruel" is an image.  None of the information on these images is crawl-able, and the alt text just has your name and the sections label.

I would recommend using CSS to place live text over the images so the pertinent information is crawl-able.

[devrox]

Thank you for the heads up and advice on CSS, I'm not nearly an expert in these areas so will have to look up some guides on how to change that in word press.

Do you happen to know of an easy guide that is available to explain this process?

[devrox]

The main search term is 'elvis impersonator', but also 'elvis impersonators' and 'elvis tribute'.

I first became aware of a significant change last spring (which is when I believe a big google change occured) hence why I was worried it was a penalty of some kind. I wasn't monitoring the situation closely at the time as there didn't appear to be a problem with where I was.

It seemed to just drop from page 1 to something like page 10 if i recall correctly so definitely not a good sign! That was with the previous site design however, i was hoping for better luck with the word press site.

[William.Lau]

If this happened so dramatically and in April it is very likely a Panda/Penguin problem.  You should definitely send a reconsideration request to see if you are in penalty.

If it comes back there is no penalty, it may be that Google devalued a lot of the links that you may have.

Your internal linking has a lot of no anchor text, you should use some anchor text for your internal links and using alt="" for your images to describe what is being shown.

[devrox]

Thanks William, I will send a reconsideration request and sort out the anchor text as you've suggested, this is all very useful and I'm learning all the time.