Why, oh why does Google hate us?

[candylotus]

My URL is:
www.drupalgeeks.org

I have tried my very best to cover all the usual SEO items.... But nothing... We are a legitimate company offering a legitimate service. Ideally we would come up in the results for:

"Drupal Developers"
"Drupal Development" and
"Drupal Designers"

Yet, we cannot break the top 50 for any of these....

We have:
Optimized Meta Tags
Written Quality Content
Maintained a Social Presence in Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, Youtube, and Google Plus
Blogged with some consistency
Guest Blogged
Canonicalization
And dozens of other things

And we are all around nice people and a good company....... Why oh why?

Can anyone take a look and see if there is something blatantly obvious I am missing?

Are we using "drupal" too much??

Thank you in advanced for any assistance.

Candice

[MarieHaynes]

Hi Candice,

Your problem may lie in overoptimized backlinks.  Your top anchors are "drupal developer" and "drupal development".  This type of link building worked well in the past, but these days can get you penalized.  Without having a deep look it's hard to say whether you've been penalized or whether Google is just no longer giving you credit for those links.

Links are important for ranking and these days the links that count are ones that are naturally earned which are unfortunately hard to get.

[KevinBudzynski]

Isn't it generally accepted that pagerank still affects rankings (I did notice you used really)?

Matt Cutts “PageRank while important, it`s **one of the most important **out of 200 signals that we have, is still one of only 200 signals that we use in ranking.”

[MarieHaynes]

Hi Kevin,

It looks like the answer that I was referencing has been removed, but I'll give you my thoughts on whether or not PageRank affects ranking.  The answer that got removed was implying that if you can get a higher PageRank then you will rank higher, but this is not always the case.  If you do a search for almost any query, especially localized queries you can see sites that are ranking well that have a PR of 0 or 1.

Also, saying "Get a higher PR" is like saying, "Weigh less" without giving instructions on how to do that.  The way you would get a higher PR is by getting good quality links to your site.  So, the answer would be to get good links and as a result, your PR would be likely to increase.  It is the acquisition of links that helps, not the PR.

[candylotus]

Thanks Marie for the thoughtful response! We will keep on pushing! It's is difficult to build links in high volumes, but hopefully our content will help us.

[MarieHaynes]

Hopefully.  You may find that you have to either get some of those overoptimized links removed, nofollowed or disavowed in order to see improvement.  It's a tough call though because you have the potential to do more harm than good.