Have we suffered a Google penalty?

[ukss1984]

Hello,

In January, we started a new blog to supplement our core ecommerce website. The URL of the website is www.footballshirtblog.co.uk and the idea behind it was that we would write articles related to our industry to build a community which would ultimately boost our sales.

We would add several posts per day, a mix between shorter news stories of around 150 words and more detailed content pages of around 500 words.

Everything was going well, we were making slow but sure progress on the main generic keywords but were receiving several thousand visitors a day, mostly finding the posts themselves on Google.

The surge on traffic meant we needed to move server, which we did around 6 weeks ago. When we did this, we had a few teething problems with file permissions, etc, which meant we were tempoarily able to add new posts. As our developers were tied up with other issues, this continued for a 7-10 day period, with no new content being added.

In this period, the site completely dropped from Google, losing all it's rankings and traffic, to the extent it now doesn't even rank for it's own name. This is very frustrating as we have put a huge amount of work and content into developing this site.

We have added a few posts since, but not a huge amount as it is frustrating to do it with no return and the concern that the site has been banned forever. I cannot think of any logical reason why this penalty has occured as we haven't been link spamming, etc.

Does anyone have any feedback or suggestions as to how we can get back on track?

Regards,
David

[SteveOllington]

Is it a shared server you moved to? You could be sharing with a dodgy site that's got a blacklisted IP.

[Highland]

Make sure all your DNS is pointed correctly. If you have a lame nameserver somewhere that could cause you problems. Use this tool to make sure your site is resolving properly

http://www.opendns.com/cache

Did you move and then just hard shut-off the old site? If so, you might have created an issue where bots would still resolve the old site from cache and thought your site was down.

Have you checked the Google webmaster tools to see if Google has reported any problems?

[ukss1984]

Thanks for your feedback. I have checked these issues and it doesn't seem to solve the issue.

We moved the site to www.eapps.com server, but I can't find anything on there which would suggest why Google might have penalised the site.

I have also checked the opendns and as far as I can see there seems to be no issue there.

Does anyone have any further suggestions on how to tackle this issue?

Regards,

Simon

[ukss1984]

Does anyone have any further feedback on this?  We are at a complete lost as to why the penalty may have occured.