HELP! Google is penalizing me and I can't figure out why.

[absoauto]

I've come to the conclusion Google is definitely penalizing me for the keword "sensaphone" and I cannot figure out why. I've checked back links etc. and I don't see anything that would raise a flag. We rate very well in Bing etc. for the same keyword, but in Google SERP's will be on the 3rd or later page. Our domain is - www.absoluteautomation.com - any ideas?

[Hutch42]

Just because you rate well on Bing and not Google does not mean you are being penalized.  Bing uses a less sophisticated algorithm compared to Google so different tactics (older ones) can rank you higher on Bing.  Just keep doing the right thing with content creation and adding value to your site that people who use the word "sensaphone" in a search will find useful.

[MattAntonino]

I don't mean to be obvious about this but yeah, your link profile has issues, starting with your own link network:

• http://driveway-alarm.com/
• http://boat-alarm.com/
• http://freezealarms.com/
• http://entry-alarm.com/
• http://sensaphone-alarm.com/
• http://drivewayalarmreview.com/

According to Majestic Historic links your backlink profile is a disaster. They show over 90,000 links from nearly 2000 different domains. The site has been online for 15 years so I'm sure that a) there are worse links that have not been picked up and b) it's had old school 2002 SEO.

To be honest, you have a 15+ year old site and it shows. The backlink profile is a disaster and your info has been copied around the web from pretty much every page of your site. Put the two together and yeah, you wouldn't/shouldn't rank very highly with the current situation.

Hope the analysis helps some! It's going to be quite a lot of work to get you where you want to be from where you are today.

[absoauto]

Doh. We still rank well with most of our keywords, I'm wondering if we're on borrowed time then. Do you think we would be better off removing any incoming links from domains within our "link network"?

[absoauto]

Also, how important is the "historical" link profile? When I check my current link profile, it's still not great. But not nearly as bad the historical profile shows (I don't think). Thanks again!

[MattAntonino]

We have had two massive clients (one well-known real estate company, one international brand) both manually penalised for these type of links so I would say you should probably start working them out of existence before you get penalised as well. (If I had been a Google reviewer instead of an SEO guy helping me out, you'd have a penalty. All it takes is the wrong set of eyes on the site.)

As far as your below question re: historic link profile, it's hard to say. You never know what Google sees, when they first saw it and how much they value it. I believe links get less valuable over time so to some extent it's not the be-all, end-all but if those links have been only just crawled in the last few months even if they were created 10 years ago, they may be just as valuable as one created today.