At a Loss With What to do With This Site

[Eavesy]

Hi people, a friend of mine runs a payday loan site with a very valuable domain name: http://bit.ly/1lyJgME

The site was penalised by Google about 18 months ago, up until then it ranked #1 for payday loan and on the 1st page for the plural, payday loans in the UK. Now the website is nowhere in the top 200 results for either of the phrases, but he has not received any notification from Google and if he checks in webmaster tools in the manual actions section  there is nothing there.

He has gone through all of the links to his site several times and attempted to remove any unnatural links, those that he could not get rid of after emailing twice he disavowed - about 800, a lot were not even built by him.

He has sent 2-3 reconsideration requests to Google and every time they said that the site had not been penalised, or something to that affect.

The site does have lots of quality organic links from websites like Wired Magazine and the National Geographic, more then enough decent links to rank somewhere on Google for its keywords.

I feel that the site may have been held to a higher standard because a lot of people think that payday loan websites are unethical.

What do you think he should do? Can you spot anything on site that is wrong? He has definitely tried to remove every single unnatural link and the ones he could not he disavowed.

[tdawson09]

He needs to start with the obvious first. Take a look at Webmaster Tools to make sure Google is indexing his pages. Do a Fetch on some pages to see what Google sees. Next move would be to have a full, in depth site audit done to review all the elements of the site. Screaming Frog is a good tool for that. Then he needs to go back and explore his links again. Adding some new, relevant links will help.

[EGOL]

just sayin.....

This site is displaying a lot of images that they probably do not own...  images owned by companies who are really really aggressive in going after infringers.    In 2012, Google said that they were getting millions of DMCA notices EVERY MONTH and were taking action against sites that get repeated complaints.  The Pirate Update. More here.

This might not be the problem you are seeing at this time... but if they don't have permission for the images would be a good thing to get under control.

[MarieHaynes]

Payday loans sites are notoriously difficult to recover because of the widespread spam in the industry.

Do you have any manual action at all in Webmaster Tools?  To check, go to Search Traffic --> Manual Actions.

If there is no manual action then it's possible that the site is affected by the Payday Loans algo: http://searchengineland.com/google-pay-day-loan-algorithm-google-search-algorithm-update-to-target-spammy-queries-162941\.  Unfortunately we don't know a lot about this algorithm and how to recover.

One of the things that I think is vitally important is that in order to rank as a payday loans site you have to be a legitimate brick and mortar business.  (This is just my opinion.  I don't have proof of this.)  When I go to the site, the fact that there is no phone number published raises flags for me.  When I Googled the address I got a building that primarily has a carpet store in it.  I found this site that shows me businesses near 928 High Rd and there is no mention of a Payday Loans company: http://www.192.com/places/n/n12-9/n12-9rw/

I think that Google only wants to rank Payday loan sites that are legitimate businesses and don't just exist online.  Don't get me wrong - You still could be a legitimate business, but from Google's standpoint the site looks like many of the hundreds of other payday loans sites that exist only on the internet and are affiliates of well known trusted businesses.

If that's not it, then it's possible that the Penguin algorithm is affecting the site.  What I have found is that recovery from Penguin is EXTREMELY hard for a payday loans site.  When we have removed manual penalties from Payday loans sites, Google has given us remote example links that were nowhere to be found on any backlink checkers.  Penguin is slightly different because Google won't give you example links, but if Penguin was the issue then you have to find close to every bad backlink ever made in order to see recovery and you have to have a good base of truly natural links.

We've recovered payday loans sites from manual penalties, but have learned that these cases are significantly harder than other sites.  As such, we now only take clients in the loans vertical that have true brick and mortar businesses and we charge significantly more for these sites.

I wish I had more encouraging advice for you.  If the site is truly a legitimate business outside of the internet, then I would work hard to establish that fact so that Google can recognize you.  I'd focus next on doing everything you can to find additional unnatural backlinks that you can disavow.  Make sure that you are disavowing on the domain level as well.

[KarlBantleman]

Just a quick question, what have National Geographic and Wired Magazine got to do with payday loans? Obviously I haven't seen them but if they are just random links then I'd count them as spammy even though they are on highly authoritative websites. If you look at the distribution of anchor text as well it is heavily weighted to keyword anchor text links (payday loans) rather than branded links.

Exact Match Domains took a bit of hit as well so the benefits that the website would have received from having an EMD would have been devalued. I'd say to work on building some quality and relevant links because the website is lacking in them.

[EGOL]

Looks like one of the NG bloggers got some infographics from paydayloans.co.uk and posted them on the NatGeo blog

http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2012/09/28/is-it-green-to-be-green/

http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2012/07/24/great-depression-vs-great-recession/

Even though NG is a white hat site (almost up there with the Pope's site), it is possible that Google thought that the loan guys were sneaking in some spammy infographic links.  One of those posts give two links to paydayloans.co.uk and to another site in the loan sector.  If I was the editor at NG those posts would not have been approved.

NatGeo looks to be a favorite target of the payday loan linkbuilders.

[MarieHaynes]

Very interesting!  But the important question is how I can get a payday loans link from the pope's site.  Have you mastered that yet EGOL?  

[EGOL]

Content like this will probably do it...

http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0839/_PMV.HTM

"Many a man who asks for a loan adds to the burdens of those who help him; If the lender is able to recover barely half, he considers this an achievement;"

[MarieHaynes]

Perfect!  You think he'd take $100 to link to me?  And, do you promise not to tell Google?

EDIT:  That page has a meta robots nofollow on it.  That sneaky devil.

[Eavesy]

Hi guys, thanks for the responses.

We have used the Screamingfrog tool and spotted a bunch of 403 pages so we are looking into that.

Images were all used with permission.

I have mentioned the telephone number and address thing to the guy.

I have checked about the national geographic link and there was definitely no bribe involved.