Website "penalized" 3 times by Google

[AdamThompson]

I have a website that I'm working with that has had the misfortune of gaining rankings/traffic on Google, then having the rankings/traffic removed...3 times! (Very little was changed on the site to gain or lose "favor" with Google, either.)

Notes:

• Site is a mixture of high quality original content and duplicate content (vacation rental listings)
• When traffic crashes, we lose nearly all rankings and traffic (90+%)
• When traffic crashes, we lose all rankings sitewide, including those gained by our high quality, unique pages
• None of the "crash" dates appear to coincide with any Panda update dates
• We are working on adding unique content to our pages with duplicate content, but it's a long process and so far doesn't seem to have made any difference
• I'm confounded why Google keeps "changing its mind" about our site
• We have an XML sitemap, and Google keeps our site indexed pretty well, even when we lose our rankings
• Due to the drastic and sitewide loss of rankings, I'm assuming we are dealing with some sort of algorithmic penalty

Timeline:

1. Traffic steadily grows starting in Jan 2011
2. Traffic crashes on Feb 19, 2011. We assumed it was due to a pre-panda anti-scraper update, but don't know.
3. Google sends traffic to our site on March 1, then none the next day
4. On June 16th, I block part of the site using robots.txt (most of the section wasn't indexed anyway)
5. On June 17th, Google starts ranking our site again. I thought it might be due to the robots.txt change, but I had just made the change a few hours ago, and Google wasn't even indexing the part of the site I blocked
6. Traffic/rankings crash again on July 6th. No theory why.

Site URL: http://www.floridaisbest.com

Traffic Stats: Attached

I know that we need more backlinks and less duplicate content, but I can't explain why our Google rankings are "on again, off again". I have never seen a site gain and lose all of its rankings/traffic so drastically multiple times, for no apparent reason.

Any thoughts or ideas would be welcome. Thanks!

t8IqB

[KeriMorgret]

No answers for you at the moment, but a couple of more questions.

1. Is there anything at all similar happening in Yahoo/Bing, or has their traffic been normal this whole time?

2. Have you checked Google Webmaster Tools for any notices from Google about possible penalties or hacking of your site?

3. Anyone in the company tried to "help" by buying links?

4. Any downtime with servers?

[AdamThompson]

1. Traffic from Yahoo/Bing is nearly non-existent.

2. Yes, nothing abnormal there.

3. No bought links.

4. No downtime that I know of.

[RyanKent]

Hi Adam.

I looked at your home page and robots.txt file. All seemed ok. I confirmed the site is not indexed with Google. My next thought went to external links.

On the home page there is a "Travel Search" block. Those links don't work and cause my browser to hang. I tried a couple times and from different pc's using different browsers. I would suggest investigating the issue as it could be related.

[AdamThompson]

Site appears to be well indexed to me. You get no results for a site: search?

[RyanKent]

My apologies. I included a space.

site: http://www.floridaisbest.com  (a space after the colon) shows this article as the first result, and the site not indexed

site:http://www.floridaisbest.com shows the site correctly indexed.

[AdamThompson]

I got a PM from another user who has a site with known duplicate content that was also penalized on July 6th. To my mind, that is further evidence that our site is suffering from algorithmic penalties due to duplicate content.

[AdamThompson]

Well, good news. I implemented a strategy based on the assumption that our site was just outside Google's duplicate content or quality guidelines. Our traffic rebounded yesterday!

[RyanKent]

Good to hear. Hope your site doesn't bounce back out of the index again.