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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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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...
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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?
You have my sympathies but we need to focus on the way your site is
now, correcting anything that is unsatisfactory now, and then - if
necessary - you can submit a businesslike request for
reconsideration.
You can be reassured that lots of people have had there sites returned
to google goodstanding once the "faults" have been corrected.
The exact details of who did what when and why and who knew what are
not really relevant to google evaluation as long as (a) you fix any
faults; (b) you summarise what you have done; and (c) satisfy google
that you have no intention of allowing a recurrence of the faults. In
other words, if it is your submission that your previous SEO was
buying links, the most relevant things NOW are that (i) you have done
your best to remove all such links; (ii) you have replaced your
previous SEO; and (iii) it ain't going to happen again. Part of the
reconsideration process is that you are open and honest with google,
show that you know what the "faults" were and that you have fixed
them.
Website owners in this sort of situation also need to distinguish
clearly between and actual PENALTY/BANNING and a fall in ranking for
other reasons (such as the removal of the artificially high boost you
may have previously obtained due to the bought links which have now
been devalued/removed.
So I suggest a multi-pronged attack on the situation:
1. Ensure that any and all infringements (bought/sold links; spam;
hidden text/links; cloaking etc) are dealt with (removed).
2. Ensure that your site presents in a as good a way technically as
you can.
3. Review all the navigation and content from all relevant
perspectives.
4. Encourage good quality links from relevant sites - make your site
so good and useful/informative that other sites will want to link to
you without you offering any inducement/payment/exchange, etc.
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.
> 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.
I read the first paragraph, saw the URL, looked at the site,and came
immediately to the conclusion that I then read in the third.
Pages are still indexed - there's no site wide exclusion. Google has
recently made algorithm changes that have devalued certain type of
links, and if you look back in the archives of this group on "link
exchange" and similar keywords you'll find 31 October an entirely
credible date for this change.
Another impression I got, looking at the site, of "over SEOing" - too
many eggs in the pudding. It was actually a quite interesting
experience, because I saw that the <title> and description tags had
received far more care in construction that is the rule - the whole
site 'looked' SEOed.
Extending that to source level - for instance on the home page:
Just about everything on the page is in a header of some sort - an old
SEO ju-jitsu spell that died a few years back.
But there's really comparatively little real text for the bots to get
their indexing teeth into.
I suspect your old search position was indeed supported by a link
programme that Google has now nixed. The only way out is to change
the site's focus and make it much more useable for other sectors.
Since you're really in the B2B end of the business, this is probably
going to mean replacing the purchased links with links obtained
organically. I'd recommend in the first instance a classic public
relations effort addressing the relevant press in the sector.
I see that you have improved your home page head title. The version
that google cached was:
<title>Excel and Microsoft Project Training in Chicago, Computer and
Business Skills classes ranging from Sales and Customer Service to
Project Management, QuickBooks, AJAX and Ruby on Rails!</title>
and now your head title is:
<title>Chicago Computer Training and Classes | Training Connection</
title>
The new one is much more focused on the area you serve.
Albuquerque Anaheim Arlington Atlanta Austin Baltimore Boston Buffalo
Charlotte Chicago Cincinnati Cleveland Colorado Springs Columbus
Dallas Denver Detroit El Paso Fort Worth Fresno Honolulu Houston
Indianapolis Jacksonville Kansas City Las Vegas Long Beach Los Angeles
Memphis Mesa Miami Milwaukee Minneapolis Nashville New Orleans New
York Newark Oakland Oklahoma City Omaha Orlando Philadelphia Phoenix
Pittsburgh Portland Raleigh Sacramento San Antonio San Diego San
Francisco San Jose Santa Ana Seattle St. Louis St. Paul Tampa Toledo
Tucson Tulsa Virginia Beach Washington
Xenu Link Sleuth reports 63 deadlinks (nearly 10% of all the links on
your site, but many are to missing images rather than pages). You
really ought to fix all of those.
I wouldn't expect too much about a reconsideration request.
The current state of the site exactly shows that you've invested a lot
into seo instead of developing the site, providing something special,
something unusuall, what would make you stand out from the similar
sites.
~14% of the home-page and 17% of the training page is "training"- for
me this shows low quality content, not relevance.
as mentioned before listing locations at the bottom of the homepage-
also will not help.
The backlink problem (lack of any natural) is obvious: cheap directory/
exchanged links.
So at least before the reconsideration request clean up these issues
and start to work heavily on the site to produce something unique,
something special that may result in some natural backlinks.
Also would be good to review your copy in details- obviously your are
not a content provider but the 1-2 paragraphs what you need to
describe yourself, your serveces properly has to be high quality.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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?
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