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[WorldEscape]

Hello all

We are looking for any insight we can get as to why all (except 1) of our sites were effected very badly in the rankings by Google since the Panda updates.

Several of our sites londonescape.com dublinescape.com and prague, paris, florence, delhi, dubai and a few others (all escape.com urls) have had major drop in their rankings.

LondonEscape.net (now.com (changed after rank drop) ), was ranked between 4th & 6th but is now down around 400th and DelhiEscape.net and MunichEscape.com were both number 1 for several years for our main key words

We also had two Stay sites number 1 , AmsterdamStay and NewYorkstay both .com ranked number 1 for years , NewYork has dropped to 10th place so far the Amsterdam site has not been effected.

We are not really sure what we did wrong. MunichEscape and DelhiEcape should never have been page 1 sites ) just 5 pages and a click thru to main site WorldEscape) but we never did anything to make them number 1.

London, NewYork and Amsterdam sites have had regular new content added, all is checked to make sure its original.

**Since the rankings drop **

LondonEscape.com site

We have redirected the.net to the .com  url

Added a mountain of new articles and content

Redesigned the site / script

Got a fair few links  removed from sites, any with multiple links to us. A few I have not managed yet to get taken down.

So far no result in increased rankings.

We contacted Google but they informed us we have NOT had a manual ban imposed on us, we received NO mails from Google informing us we had done anything wrong.

We were hoping it would be a 6 month ban but we are way past that now.

Anyone any ideas ?

[Dr-Pete]

Are your sites cross-linked at all (I'm not seeing anything obvious)? The cascade effect across all of them almost suggests they were either (1) seen as a link network, or (2) you're using the same link strategy across all of them.

I'd watch the keyword stuffing - your titles are pretty aggressive, and then you repeat those lists in the copy at the top and bottom of the page. It's borderline at best. I don't think it's enough to get multiple sites penalized, but it may not be helping you right now.

You've got a duplicate of the London Escape home-page floating out there in the index:

http://www.londonescape.com/index.php?option=com_wesearch&task=loginVIAFacebook

Might want to add rel=canonical to the home-page, just to sweep up things like that.

You're indexed and I'm able to get the site ranking on very targeted keywords (exact-match and fairly unique), but you fall off the map for everything else. That's definitely indicative of a link-based penalty.

[WorldEscape]

Hello Brian

Thanks for the coments

We have been removing links since the site went down in the rankings so that accounts for the slow hemorage of links

We thought having the .com would be better than the .net as was recommended by a SEO company we hired and then fired.

We had a links company 5 + years back get us links and that is how we have 50% links with same anchor, stupid we now know of course and could well be something to do with penalty.

Several of our other sites would be in the same link boat I guess and also went down the rankings but they had little content, so it is not surprising they went down.

We were never bothered with analytics as our sites were all top and were for years. The drop came after penguin update.  Over a few days the sites all went down.

[WorldEscape]

Hello Charles.

Thanks for taking a look at londonescape.com , this is the correct site.

As far as I know, all our pages have meta descriptions.

Not sure what you mean by (a production description is in one place and the order button is on another page). Each property has it's own page and the order / book button is on the same page.

There is a fair bit of internal linking and all our content is 100% original text.

We have asked Google and got this reply

There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team.
Of course, there may be other issues with your site that affect your site's ranking. Google's computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users.
If you've experienced a change in ranking which you suspect may be more than a simple algorithm change, there are other things you may want to investigate as possible causes, such as a major change to your site's content, content management system, or server architecture. For example, a site may not rank well if your server stops serving pages to Googlebot, or if you've changed the URLs for a large portion of your site's pages. This article has a list of other potential reasons your site may not be doing well in search.
If you're still unable to resolve your issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team

We are in the process of removing links we suspect may be spammy.

Many of our article pages do rank very high in Google,  just rankings for our main keywords are in the 100's.

[KeriMorgret]

Charles,

I took a look at the home page and two random pages of londonescape.com. All three had meta descriptions. Were you by chance referring to a different domain? Making that clear would help.

Rather than stating something is horrible, it's more helpful to state that it is difficult to use because a production description is in one place and the order button is on another page (an example from one of my own sites).

I'm looking at content pages from the main navigation of londonescape.com, such as Guest Information and Short Term Apartments, and see plenty of internal linking.