Client's site dropped completely for all keywords, but not brand name - not manual penalty... help!

[Greg_Gifford]

We just picked up a new search client a few weeks ago. They've been a customer (we're an automotive dealer website provider) since October of 2011. Their content was very generic (came from the previous provider), so we did a quick once-over as soon as he signed up. Beefed up his page content, made it more unique and relevant... tweaked title tags... wrote meta descriptions (he had none).

In just over a week, he went from ranking on page 4 or 5 for his terms to ranking on page 2 or 3. My team was working on getting his social media set up, set up his blog, started competitor research...

And then this last weekend, something happened and he dropped completely from the rankings... He still shows up if you do a site: search, or if you search his exact business name, but for everything else, he's nowhere to be found.

His URL is www.ohioautowarehouse.com, business name is "Ohio Auto Warehouse"

We filed a reconsideration request on Monday, and just got a reply today that there was no manual penalty. They suggested we check our content, but we know we didn't do anything spammy or blackhat.

We hadn't even fully optimized his site yet - we were just finishing up his competitor research and were planning on a full site optimization next week... so we're at a complete loss as to what happened.

Also, he's not ranking for any of the vehicles in his inventory. Our vehicle pages always rank on page 1 or 2, depending on how big the city is... you can always search "year make model city" and see our customers' sites (whether they're doing SEO or not). This guy's cars aren't showing up... so we know something is going on...

Any help would be a lifesaver. We've been doing this for quite some time now, and we've never had a site get penalized. Since the reconsideration request didn't help, we're not sure what to do...

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Greg, this sounds like an algorithmic penalty. It could be to do with the site itself or more likely it could be to do with external aspects that are / were beyond your control.

Google has replied and told you to check your content so this certainly needs some investigation for starters.

1. External Duplication

I did a quick copyscape search for the homepage and it came back with 26 other sites with the same or similar content (mostly craigslist sub domains).

I did another copyscape search for one product page and it came back with 80 results of sites with the same or similar content.

You have external duplication issues.

2. Link Profile

There is no link profile to speak of so that is not the problem - 16 links from 6 sites. Nothing of any quality.

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So, without getting all CSI on this, you have a site with no links and a whole bucket load of content duplication on other sites. Whether they are cutting and pasting this content and dropping it on other sites or they are taking it from other places, you need to A) sort this out & B) educate them going forward.

Get the duplication sorted, get a few decent links, add a bit of unique content (try moving the blog onto the main domain instead of on the blog. sub domain) and you will bounce back for these long tail searches at least.

Seriously though, I have seen this a bunch of times. I have even seen older static sites have their content so pillaged and scraped that they got penalised but it was easy fixed by just making the content unique and leave the old duplicated stuff to the haters and scrapers. You probably can't control all these external sites as easy as you can edit the site itself so get onto that quick smart and tell your client to stop dropping this content on every single website imaginable.

As google hinted - look at your content.

Hope this helps! Shout if I can help!

P.S. Oh, and the URLs are horrible, something a little shorter and less obviously dynamic would be better for users.

[dohertyjf]

Just one more, you have some weird internal duplication going on too. The following URLs are indexed but render the homepage:

http://www.ohioautowarehouse.com/contactus.php?stock=CAR%20HAULER&year=1999&make=Ford&model=F-350%20SD&trim=XLT%20Crew%20Cab%20DRW%204WD

http://www.ohioautowarehouse.com/contactus.php?stock=q2311&year=2004&make=Cadillac&model=Escalade&trim=AWD

I bet there are more of these too. Maybe these pages are supposed to 404/redirect and instead are mirroring the homepage? That could be causing the issue.

[Greg_Gifford]

yeah - the system shows the home page whenever a sold vehicle page is requested (i know, not the right way to do it at all - fighting that battle with our dev team already)

but the same thing happens with all of our customers' sites (over 1000), and no one else is penalized for it...

[Greg_Gifford]

Thanks Marcus -

as far as the Craigslist stuff - it's duplicated because he lists his inventory on Craigslist. We see this with all of our dealers who list inventory on CL, but it's never penalized anyone.

Also, inventory is fed out to hundreds of classified sites, so you'll see supe content there as well - but it's never hurt any of our dealers (and it's extremely common in the auto industry)

As far as the other websites that come up, they're other customers - 99% of our websites have the same menu buttons, as they're pretty standardized in the auto industry... and for those customers who don't do SEO, there's really generic basic text which leads to similar/duplicate content issues.  But again, it's never caused a penalty before...

can't do anything about dupe content on the vehicle side of things, but we'll definitely update the content on his custom pages... and obviously we'll start linkbuilding...

hopefully that will be enough to get him back in...

[Marcus_Miller]

I doubt it buddy! No one said this was fair and I would certainly try to make as much of it as unique as possible to get out of this hole!

[dohertyjf]

Hey Greg, any resolution on this?

[Greg_Gifford]

(rolling eyes)

I need a big "I heart google" shirt...

so we filed a reconsideration request the week that this happened, then got a reply that it wasn't a manual penalty and that we should look at the content.

so we filed another one, with a very in-depth explanation that we hadn't changed much content, we weren't violating any Google guidelines, and we hadn't done anything to trigger an algorithmic penalty...

since this started, we didn't do anything on his site - zero changes to content (wanted to wait until we heard back from the 2nd request) - we added a single link from a car dealer directory site (that you have to call to be listed in) the day we realized he had dropped from the SERPs, but nothing since then...

the ONLY thing we did was finally sort out his + Local listing - the address was displaying as 916 but is really 915 - but since he didn't know who registered his Places page, we had to re-verify... so there were 2 verified google accounts with access to the Places dashboard, which apparently causes issues and problems... we got that sorted out so that we're the only account with access... and we updated the address...

then we got a reply Monday from our 2nd reconsideration request that was word-for-word the same as the first one - no manual penalty, check your content, blah blah blah...

and as of Tuesday of this week, BAM - he's back in the SERPs... he's around page 3 or 4 for most of his targeted terms, so the little bit of initial optimization we did has him ranking higher than he was before he signed up with us...

so - don't know if the Places/+ Local address being off by a few numbers was the problem (probably not, cause that problem was there before we started) or if the second reconsideration request got someone to look and fix something... or if it was just a really random algorithmic hiccup...