Why is Google Still Penalizing My Site?
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We got hit pretty hard by Penguin. There were some bad link issues which we've cleared up and we also had a pretty unique situation stemming from about a year ago when we changed the name of the company and created a whole new site with similar content under a different URL. We used the same phone number and address, and left the old site up as it was still performing well. Google didn't care for that so we eventually used 301 redirects to push the link juice from the old site to the new site.
That's the background, here's the problem...... We've partially recovered, but there are several keywords that haven't come back anywhere near where they were in Google. We have higher page rank and more links than our competition and are performing in the top 5 for some of our keywords. Other, similar keywords, where we used to be in the top 5, we are now down on page 4 or 5.
Our website is www.hudsoncabinetrydesign.com. We build custom cabinetry and furniture in Westchester County, NY just north of NYC.
Examples - For "custom built-ins new york" we are number 3 on Google, number 1 on Bing/Yahoo.
For "custom kitchen cabinetry ny" we are number 3 on Bing/Yahoo, not in the top 50 on Google.
For "custom radiator covers ny" we used to be #1 on Google, are currently #48, currently #2 on Bing/Yahoo.
Obviously, we've done something to upset the Google, but we've run out of ideas as to what it could be. Any ideas as to what is going on?
Thanks so much for your feedback,
Doug B.
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We did a soft launch of the new site and really took it live in December of 2011, so that is the bump you are seeing there.
The Penguin hit was sharp and instant on April 24th. Not sure precisely when the clean out was done. We have an off-site SEO who handles that. I was told that it was pretty much one bad link that had replicated across a a slew of blog postings and has since been cleaned up.
The 301 redirects were done more recently, in August. It took us a while to figure out that that was part of the problem. Some of the redirects have worked perfectly. The new site replaced the old site in the SERPS with almost no change in ranking. Others fell off a cliff. All the content and tags were relatively consistent across the pages that had the redirects applied. It just seems like we've got two separate groupings here. One has recovered from Penguin and the redirects have worked and the others we just can't get fixed.
At no point in any of this have we received any notifications from WMT.
Thanks!
Doug
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Hi,
You are in a pretty bad shape there indeed and it is indeed consistant with the release of Penguin update on Apr 24.
However based on your visibility index you also had a spike up starting with December 2011 and now you are back to flat line again in the visibility index.
Did you also received a link notification via WMT ?
When did you 301 redirect the old site to the new version ?
There were some bad link issues which we've cleared up
** Are those pointing to the first site or to the current official version of the site ?
Did you clean all of them ? Part of them ? What is the ratio ? (eg: you've identify 1000 bad links and cleaned up 800 )
Was the clean-out before or after Penguin 1.1 (May 25)
That will help with a better assessment of the problem you are facing now.
Cheers,
R
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