Website not ranking for noncompetitive terms

[dentaldesign]

Hi,

We've took over a website last July and no matter what we do we just can't get it ranking in Google, even for noncompetitive terms.

here is the website in question:

http://www.alignandsmile.co.uk

Ideally the client would like to rank for Canary Wharf but that location is competitive, the site doesn't even rank for 'Dentist New Providence Wharf E14' despite it being included in the title tag on the home page and in the content throughout the website.

Directories with Align and Smile's business information do rank however. I opened a case with google through Webmaster tools and they  'reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google.'

So I'm a bit stuck. The site ranks top for the keyphrase in Bing and Yahoo...we are really struggling with Google!

Any help would be much appreciated.

many thanks

Marcus

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Marcus

Marcus here!

Well, the site looks okay but it is behaving as if it has a search penalty. There is something I have been discussing with a few folks working on penalised sites and generally, if you search for a block of text from a penalised page with double quotes it returns the page, without the quotes, nowhere to be found.

"You will only pay for the private treatment you need and want" - returns the page

You will only pay for the private treatment you need and want - nowhere to be found

Now, this is hardly science but it is something that I have seen replicated across many penalised sites and it also seems specific to a given page that has an algorithmic penalty meaning that if we try the same thing on a non penalised page then it returns as a result as we would expect.

There are two big obvious algorithmic penalties broadly relating to on page and off page problems and it seems you may have a dose of both of them.

Penguin - Check your backlinks, they are very anchor text heavy and highly unlikely to be natural, editorial votes.

Panda - Your content seems to be duplicated across several other sites.

I would imagine several things have happened.

1. Site was built by a company that makes dentist sites and it uses generic content across all sites
2. Link building was done to improve on the poor ranks and that has just made things worse

In a nutshell you need to do the below:

1. review all the content and make it unique and informative (feed it through copyscape when this is done)
2. clean up the nasty link profile (look at rmoov, link detox and removeem)
3. ideally generate a small amount of high quality links

This is algorithmic, so it is better than a manual penalty so you just need to ensure you get the site all fully compliant with the google guidelines.

Some recommended reading:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/fat-pandas-and-thin-content

http://www.bowlerhat.co.uk/blog/seo/anchor-text-ratios-and-link-building/

Hope that helps!
Marcus

[dentaldesign]

Thanks for you help with this Marcus - I'll certainly address the content and have a look at the link profile and remove any dodgy links and hopefully that will help!

Marcus