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My understanding is, as I haven't been through an algorithm penalty before only read about them, is that you have to wait it out till the next refresh. Refreshes happen typically monthly or three monthly however that bit I can find less information on.

Hi Jayneel,

I think your problem lies with your concentration of keywords causing a penalty.

You have over 5000 links to that one page of which 47% are for iphone app development, 25% iphone application development and 12% iphone development

That's not natural and probably the cause of why you find it impossible to rank for those terms. You need to, potentially, undo the work you have paid to have done and once the penalty clears move forwards in a more balanced manner.

To do this you'll need a full link audit and a plan to get you back to a more balanced link profile.

Brian

The tabs are a method to display information that is in the page. Google see's all the information...it's not an seo problem...in fact it's a way of not overwhelming a user with too much information.

The webpage is in no way thin due to tabs (seo-wise)

If you need to check this view the source of the page all the information is there

Hi Dianne,

Sorry I should have explained more. Reading back my answer seemed short and without context.

When you that you had got the page to where you wanted it I wanted to say that the page is going to hold you back in its current state. There is no way to optimise for 1400 words and the method you use is frowned upon by google and if it's ranking for you now could cause a penalty in the future.

The best way to do it is to optimise this page for a few (2-6 depending upon the content) related keywords and make new pages written exclusively for the other keywords. That way you have control over more of the important seo onsite techniques such as matching url and page titles, h1 tags. It's not possible to do those for 1400 words.

So you might find that it will take forever to do 1400 keywords but my question is do you really need 1400 towns and cities? I'd hazard a guess that 98% of those will never bring you traffic. Use google keyword tool to estimate which ones will bring you more than others. If you have a budget run a payperclick campaign to double check these findings but it's unlikely that someone in solihull will write "gastric band hypnosis in solihull" it's just not worth trying to optimise the page for the one person that will search that specific every other year.

I hope this is a better explanation.

Try using Ahrefs or seospyglass which often show up more. No tool will show them all so you might need to use several.

I'm not sure all those 1400 keywords at the bottom of the page is a good idea (covering every town I can think of in the UK)

Have you 100% written that text yourself or is it from the manufacturer?

"Insulated winter warmth comes courtesy of plump, 550 fill European premium quality down, in a fully seam sealed HyVent shell which will keep out the rain."

came up as you on top so it is not the whole site.

You might find they are linking through a 3rd party feed supplier such as awin.

If I owned an affiliate site I don't think I'd want rel-canonical tags in my page.

Not that I am aware of. If you publish the product first and let google find it on your site first before adding it to the feed google should know you are the primary source.

If when the affiliate link is a link to your site this also should help you.

Take a snippet of your description place it in inverted commas and google it. Do you come up first? You should.

You could remove all descriptions from your feeds or maybe have your programmer only place the first paragraph in the feed or a shortened version or (I don't know if this will work) add available to buy at XYZ online in your description feed.To remove it completely makes it hard for the affiliate to sell your product.

Pm me a webpage that you think has been affected.

It's odd that you were not seen as the original source of the content. Affiliates can bring you good business. Could you have a second copy of the product description for your affiliate feed members?

From my experience it doesn't hit you with a duplicate penalty for this however it's terrible for user experience to arrive on a price filtered page.

Once you submit parameters to google webmaster tools it does work its way through but can take a long time.

Faster is if you can rel-canonical tag the filtered pages to the main page. That seems to get rid of them on the next crawl.

Brian

We had a few ideas but of all the site's I have seen this one had no big red flag saying here is the penalty.

If anyone else wants me to take a look I am happy to do so. The more I see the more I can find common cause however at the moment I have quite a few to get through as well as normal work so there may be a couple of days wait.

If you are interested pm me.

Hi,

It looks like a penguin refresh. I've done a few site analysis so far. If you pm me your web address I'll perform one for you and let you know what I find.

Brian

Hi,

Is there an update to this? I'm trying to help eliminate duplicated on a development site before it goes live.

I did my first manual crawl Submitted 4:31pm GMTJan 22nd 2013 and the web developers acted on my recommendations and I need to run another crawl to see if anything still needs to be done. I just ran a crawl Submitted 9:01am GMTJan 24th 2013 and it came back with the same 103 pages of duplicate but a spot test shows that the duplicate doesn't exist anymore.

I don't want to have to do this 103 times so if someone can tell me how long the cache time is I can work out when to run the second test.

Thanks

Yep....that would be it...99.99% backlink profile 1 word and 1 other backlink that also contains the word insurance

If they are your client's business partners ask them to link to your site in a more natural way such as using the web address

Webmaster tools is not a great tool to use to see your backlinks in detail.

I'd go non keyword related in your forum signatures if possible at least until you readdress the balance.

Looking at your backlinking profile it seems quite clean in terms of anchor diversity. My feeling is that the January effect is a penguin refresh.

Even though your backlinks anchors are diversity they do feature the part phrase website hosting, then fewer but still many vps hosting, domain names and web hosting.

Are these the phrases you have taken a hit for? I'd build more of mywebsitehosting.org even though you have website hosting as part of your brand name.

You have some level of control over this with forum signatures if the accounts are still alive you could change these to be less keyword driven and see if in a month something pops back.

This is all I could find apart from directory listings but I know sites that rank 100% on directory listings!

That's another option. I think I am going to recommend option 4. A lot of the guest posts written could be contacted and have the links updated (my writer got a good rapport going with many of the site owners).

Option 4 (and your option) avoids the whole admitting to google previous sins which I do feel uncomfortable with.

Thanks for being a bounce board and giving me another suggestion.

I look over seo for a site a few months ago and have been working hard to do some nice guest posting and cleaning up duplicate pages (a nightmare as its a custom programmed cms!)

It's just dawned on me that 30% of the inbound links are from low quality directory type sites and all focussed on their main keyword.

The site owner recently asked me about a site rebrand (new domain name) and how this would affect seo.

I see the options as:

1. Attempt to clear up the backlink profile at The original site (lots of work)

2. Do nothing

3. Clean up the backlink profile, Set up new site and redirect The now clean first site to the new site (lots of work)

4. Set up the new site lose some authority (you cant redirect the homepage as that is where all the spammy links point to) and redirect only safe links from The old site (luckily I changed some page structure so some are clean of old spammy links) internal pages unaffected. (less work but a potential hit on site authority as not all homepage links were spam)

Anything else I haven't thought of or any thoughts on the above?

Note: the new site is aged as it was something that was put on the burner so it has domain age and luckily only 35 directory links using the company name.

Brian

The site is very new (it didn't have any backlinks until 16th November) and your inbound anchor density is good.

Personally I think its a bit of a dance. The site is new and each backlink is quite a change for google to rank you with. When the site is more established I think it will become more stable.