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Thanks for the feedback. It's more or less what I was thinking myself. At this moment I do rather not undisclose the site's URL as I don't want to risk my competitor knowing that I am actively after his rankings.

I have a few sites that are outranked by competitors having hundreds of directory links and links from unrelated sites. Obviously I'am doing everything I can; on page optimization is superb, building good links as much as I can, but not huge amounts, taking care of fresh content whcih is of better quality than the competitors, ect. etc. But for one specific site I just can't get higher than #3 while my competitor ranks #1 and #2. I have been fairly succesful making sites rank well in somewhat competitive niches, but this is one of the things that keep bugging me. Sometimes I even feel like buying these type of links myself... But I keep telling myself that Google will catch up one day. Any advice is kore than welcome. Thanks

I don't agree. Link selling can be a very lucrative business. In fact I believe it's more the other way around. High PR sites attract more buyers e-mailing you requesting for links, and you they're simply willing to spent more, wether it's justified or not. And in terms of getting higher PR, which was OP's question, the answer can't be easier: get more quality links and keep updating your site. IMHO the PR game hasn't changed.

Manual is a no go for large sites. If someone knows a tool like this, it woul be cool to know which/ where to find. Or..... This would make a cool SEOmoz pro tool

There's no need to worry about the templates... But your content sounds 99% dupe across all of your 270+ sites. I'd start with rewriting the pages for your best converting sites and take it one by one from there. Not sure if this is in fact a manual penalty, are your URLs still apearing in the SERPS when you search for them?

Lots of WMT data is worthless. Like previous poster, I am still seeing backlinks from a couple of years ago, as well as completely off total backlink count. You're much better of using OSE.

Was a bit sarcastic with my answer but yeah the site is added to WMT and nothing funky to discover that explains the penalty.

Uhm, do you know of a way of requesting for a re inclusion outside of Webmaster Tools?

I want to bump this question, as by now I have added numerous of new pages, and loads of content. Furthermore I have also updated many pages which didn't look very valuable to me, for instance pages with 300 words or less. Where others would have one page of a specific subject, I created a complete guide with several sub pages, up to 15. All pages between 1000 and 3000 words 100% unique written by native English speakers (Canadian and US) which deliver content of the highest quality. Al together I must have added like 50 new (static) pages.

The effect of all of this was:

• Pages tend to be indexed a tad quicker;
• There has been some movement for my top two keywords, but the slightest - 26 to 18 and back to 20 for my main keyword.

I also did some article exchanges (I delivered my articles and picked good sites to exchange with, aka some of them being Google News sites, others related, but decent quality blogs (not Indian spam or the like).

I am still adding as many pages as I can, but since the site is not really moving anywhere (at least not where significant) I am slowly running out of funds.

Oh and I am also 100% sure that this has been caused by the Panda update.

Any more ideas to fight this beast?

Thanks for your reply.

When I bought the site, before the down period, it didn't have any issues and all content was still indexed.

Unfortunately, Google didn't say anything about it. I get the awkward feeling the reviewer in question might have a personal problem with the specific niche being online poker.

The site's URL is depositpoker.co.uk - I used the default Wordpress template to avoid any possible issues, but that doesn't mean I don't have the intention to use a nicer one, once the site gets indexed

On every re inclusion attempt I explained exactly what I did and tried to address everything that could have been wrong. Now, it's just content, but I am left clueless why they don't allow it back in the SERPs.

I have one site pages, just being there to age domains, which have no problem getting indexed. So I don't see why this one is.

I have a site which appears to have a Google indexation penalty. According to Google because its violating the T/Cs.

Here are some background details about the site:

The site is a online poker + deposit methods related site on a .co.uk TLD. It has 30+ uniquely written pages, and no advertising at the moment.

In June of 2010, June 10 to be precisely, I bought this site from a fellow webmaster/affiliate. After the site 's ownership changed I tried accessing the server, but I couldn't log into it . I noticed that this host had serious problems and the IP was unreachable. After trying for some time the previous owner got me all the content in Word files and I created a new hosting account and re-launched the site on June 28.

Between a couple of days after June 10 and June 28, the site was unreachable, and completely de-indexed from Google.

When I re-launched the site, I used the default Wordpress Template Twenty Ten, and created new pages with the Word files I received from the previous owner.

I waited a bit, but noticed the site didn't get re-indexed. So on August 18th I moved the content of domain xxx.com to yyy.co.uk/xxx/ and 301-ed all the former locations, hoping that this might help yyy.co.uk get indexed..... but nothing.

On October 28 of 2010 I submitted my first reconsideration request, which was processed on November 17th without any change. At that time Google didn't say if anything was wrong like now, so I just waited... and waited... and waited some more.

At some point I was ready to let this one go, as I didn't/don't see any problems with it. In fact, it used to be indexed before.

By now, I removed all links pointing to it that I had control off, and there are hardly any left over. The site as well doesn't have any outgoing links left, so that can't be it either. I also removed a kind-a duplicate keyword heavy menu from the sidebar, as well as the widgets from the footer. Finally I also fixed a problem caused by Yoast Wordpress SEO Plugin, but I only installed this plugin recently, so that could not be the problem that caused the penalty.

So after another reconsideration request Google again let me know this site still has issues, but I really have no clue which, or how to find out. I don't feel like doing any work on this site, as there is no guarantee that it will ever lose its penalty.

What should I do now?

Panda is out of the question as this site concerns a Dutch site and the SE is Google.nl.

I have a site which has been #3 in Google.nl for a certain long tail phrase for pretty long. After I optimized my site some more for this specific phrase I went to #2 and eventually some weeks later to #1.

But when I finally became #1, the celebration was short, as two weeks thereafter I dropped to #10 where I have been stuck for several weeks now...

Can this be some sort of over optimization penalty? I personally don't think so as I hardly created links with the anchor, or a variation of it. On page also seems pretty much in order to me.

Also, the site is on a exact match domain and used to rank for it, but doesn't even rank in the top #100 anymore.

Any advice?

PS: I rather don't publish the URL, but if anyone can help out I have no problem sending it in a private message, including the phrase in question.

I did in fact resubmit the sitemap, but no positive results so far. My sitemap is auto generated, but has no date or priority to it. I just went into WMTs to hit the resubmit link. To be more specific, one page I rewrote, site wide linked from the menu, as well as linked to from a couple of new posts in the site's blog section, still isn't recached. It still has a cache dating from January 9th. In this specific category I added 10 articles of each 1,500-2,000 words, all of high quality, and 100% unique. And 2 new articles of the same size are added weekly. Furthermore I ordered a first hiarchy layer category, which has only 2 very thin pages, to be rewritten. This will become a comprehensive guide of a total of 12,500 words spread out in about 10 pages. Something similar will be done for another category. To conclude, I am adding new pages to existing categories, where each existing page will be rewritten with the purpose of bringing more value for the visitors I hope to regain. I also niticed that my traffic started to drop before the actual Panda update. So there could be another reason..... Hopefully I will manage to recover as my site has much more value than most of the current top 10 rankings for my main targetted key phrase. Its been #4 for years and now #23 from US IPs, and 13 from the Netherlands (both Google.com) Any more ideas? Thanks, Giorgio

This weeks whiteboard friday is spot on the subject. Make sure to view it, it will definitely give you some ideas to think about.

I have been suffering majorly from the Google algo change, as I lost more than 50% of my traffic of my largest site. Since then I have been focusing on rewriting pages, and adding new ones. New pages are all of high quality up to 2,000 words each, and the improved pages used to be thin content pages, rewritten to about 1,000 words. All content is 100% unique. I have noticed Google still has the old pages cached, dated to more than a month back, despite new pages (linking to some of the old) being indexed. Anyway, I am pretty much desperate by now, and coul really use some advice how to fight this. FYI, I got some budget available and a writer stand-by. Thanks, Giorgio