Penalized by google. How to find out?

[alsvik]

Our webpage performs very bad on some keywords relating to one product.

At the SeoMoz-ranking page i can se we are number 9

• but we have the highest (higher than our competitors) rating in almost every category (at least 25 of 30) on the keyword difficulty report.

How do i find out why this is so, or if we have been penalized by google?On other search-engines (yahoo, bing etc) we are number one! And we have the highest pagerank among the competitors...

[alsvik]

Hi Robert

Yes, language is kind of a barrier in this case

And yes #2 are doing very well. They have a lot of content. And content is king. But we have our brand name and travelling is not just travelling (guides, quality, transfer, flights)  - so i think many users read their content, but order a package in other companies, like us. They are focused on the DIY-group of travellers.

Danish is actually such a small language that only 5 million people are fluent. Its amazing we can keep up the company running with a danish website ...

I just found another funny thing about this "rejser til gran canaria" keyword. On SeoMoz's ranking report i clearly show as "rank 1" on Google and "rank 2" on Bing and Yahoo. So SeoMoz actually read the data that is provided as we should be number 1 on that particular searchphrase ...

Under the help-section SeoMoz writes that the ranking shown on page can be different from what i experience using google due to personalization. But even when i'm logged out from google and have flushed my cache i end up #9 on google. SeoMoz suggest adding the "&pws=0" to the google url to prevent any personalization. But that doesn't help either. So something is not rigth!

Regards, Alsvik

Oh - and sorry for the name switch. My name is Alsvik. The old name reffered to the creator of the account.

[RobertFisher]

Rasmus, 
A couple of things and you will have to understand that I speak English and some passable Spanish...no Danish.

I think the Holiday meta description may be a bit of an issue...May.

I look at the #2 and they have worked on gettiing site links, etc. And they have a nice site. You might want to look at what they are doing.

Other than that, it is difficult as I know to be careful with anything that is mechanically translated.
Hope it is at least a bit helpful.

[alsvik]

Hi Robert

I see your point, but fact is that we lost 6 positions since august 2011. In january we noticed that google showed wrong title and description on the searchresultpage. It seemed that Google had created its own metadata for our page. We updated and 4-5 weeks later google was showing our title and description correctly again.

So i dont feel that our competitors "was speeding in the fast lane: I rather feel kinda like we lost it due to some crazy thing with google ...

But off course, our focus is not to have google fix it.

We will fix this by work, work and then some

www.spies.dk
Keyword (just one out of many) "rejser til gran canaria"

Thanks

[RobertFisher]

Rasmus,

First and foremost, if you are penalized by Google I doubt you will be ranking 9 on page one. So the next question is what is going to move you up? Not, how are your competitors ranking above you. The reason is that question is a trap that focuses your attention on the "inequities of ranking" instead of on what you need to do. 
Whenever you have a question like this, we need either more data or the url and keyword you are speaking of if at all possible.

Now, without it, if you are first on Bing and Yahoo, you are likely paying attention to them as being one third of all search (US) and many who have sites focus only on Google. So, good job.

For your number 9 ranking, look at a few things: Is your on site better than your competitors? Does your meta description get people to click on your site? When they do click on this page, is the content such that they are not bouncing off.Remember, if they are getting more traffic, even if you are higher PR, they will be able to move ahead of you. Is your content fresh? Etc.

Now, that said, understand there are times that someone comes out of nowhere and seems to climb to the top easily even though they do not have PR, etc. In that case, be calm and watch. Typically, with our clients we watch not where they are today, but over time. Are we moving slowly up the SERPs in a highly competitive arena? If we are already up in the SERP's, are we taking care of business so that we do not fall?

Lastly, if you can provide a keyword and a url, mozzers can provide more for you.

Best