Black listed or not, struggling on this one.

[Shuffled]

I have a client who said they are black listed and they do not come up for any search query other than their name.

I have done what I would expect to find the issues, like hurtful backlinks, poor coding etc however the code is fine, yes backlinks are a little slim.

They have also said Penguin hit them hard last year.

I am confused with this one as I have worked with clients who got hit by penguin and they improved but this particular client has not.

http://www.specialistpaintsonline.co.uk is the website, and if anyone can shed some light as I may be missing something head on.

regards

[SorinaDascalu]

Hi,

From what I saw websites that don't recover that easy are the ones hit by Panda, not by Penguin. Check if the text content of the website is unique.

There is a strange thing I see on your homepage - most of the text content is in the footer of your page, hidden by CSS - maybe you got penalized for that.

Using CSS rules to hide/show some content is not a technique penalized by default, but in your case the amount of text you hide is very large...

[Shuffled]

Sorina thank you for you reply. appreciate it. as I say its a new client so getting to grips with it, can I ask how you found the content was hidden and in the footer? but yes I would agree if hidden in the footer then that is an issue.

[SorinaDascalu]

I looked at the html code and saw the big amount of text content that was not visible on the page.

[Shuffled]

I did locate it be a link directly under the All rights reserved text. I would most likely say its being deceptive as it can its mainly there for the search engines rather than the customers?

Do you think its valuable to remove this?

[SorinaDascalu]

Normaly I would not remove it, I would just un-hide it. But if Google already penalized you for that maybe is best to remove it for a while, wait for the page to be indexed without and after add some new original text ,(not hidden) to the page because without this the homepage is rather thin in content.

[Shuffled]

Thank you, yes I would prefer to un hide it rather than remove it. I may have to rewrite the content and repost it back on the page.

thank you that has helped me make a start on the home.