The Credit Crunch and a Google Penalty - Double Whammy! - Crawling, indexing, and ranking

Message from discussion The Credit Crunch and a Google Penalty - Double Whammy!

Sasch

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More options Dec 4 2008, 7:14 am

From: Sasch

Date: Thu, 4 Dec 2008 03:14:10 -0800 (PST)

Local: Thurs, Dec 4 2008 7:14 am

Subject: Re: The Credit Crunch and a Google Penalty - Double Whammy!

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> To be safe we hired another consultant to review our site and they
> suggest a series of minor changes – which included toning down some of
> the keyword saturations, changes to header tags etc – but honestly the
> changes were really minor and they gave the site the green light.

Your consultant didn't do a very thorough job...

The spam detector still picks you up for keyword lists...

http://tool.motoricerca.info/spam-detector/

As for the reconsideration request; firstly, this can take time.

Secondly, Google will not respond individually to your request, so the
only means of figuring out what's going on is to keep an eye on
things.

However, being dumped from page 1 to page 4 is not necessarily a
penalty... it is probably just a reflection of natural rank-
fluctuation. And if you're still in the index, then filing a
reconsideration request is pretty pointless. Once again, your
consultant should have informed you about all this; which makes me
wonder just what sort of a consultant you hired here..

What's most likely happened is that your ranking slipped because your
paid-for in-links were discovered and de-valued, so my advice would be
to get rid of the unnatural text, stock your site with more user
orientated content and so attract some more inbound links of - shall
we say - higher quality.

It's not a short-term fix... be ready to spend some time doing this if
you want to regain your rankings.

On Dec 4, 12:49 pm, WilliamH wrote:

> We incurred a site-wide Google penalty around Oct 31, 2008. All our
> major terms like "Excel Training Chicago" and “Chicago Flash Training”
> disappeared from the 1st page to the 4th page.

> Our home page ishttp://www.trainingconnection.com

> We had recently parted ways with our SEO company and my immediate
> suspicion was they may have sabotaged us, but realistically I had no
> way of proving it and when I calmed down I doubted they would have
> intentionally sabotaged us. I decided to contact them and it became
> apparent that they we were purchasing links for their clients which
> may have resulted in the penalty.

> We submitted our reconsideration request on Nov 11 and received the
> Google auto-reply
> “We've received a request from a site owner to reconsider how we index
> the following site:http://www.trainingconnection.com/
> We'll review the site. If we find that it's no longer in violation of
> our Webmaster Guidelines, we'll reconsider our indexing of the site.
> Please allow several weeks for the reconsideration request. We do
> review all requests, but unfortunately we can't reply individually to
> each request.”

> More than 3 weeks have now passed and I have the unenviable task of
> having to layoff my first staff member 3 weeks before Christmas.

> So I was wondering – am I been too impatient? Is there any harm in
> submitting a second reconsideration request as I have more concrete
> proof that my old SEO company was following a link buying strategy? Or
> can anyone suggest any other changes I need to make to our site?

> The lack of response from Google is killing me – is it possible that
> they have indeed reviewed the site and simply decided to retain the
> penalty without informing me?

> I need to do something - but what?????

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