Panda and Penquin Fall - Could HTML Design an Issue?

[Force7]

Hi,

We were hit hard by Panda 3.4 on March 23rd 2012. Then Penguin came along and slapped us down a little farther on April 24th. White hat SEO for 13 years on the site.

I have been trying to discover the reason we got hit so hard, to date 90% down. We ae wiped. I have a couple of keywords still #2 and #3 and we see up and down changes in Google webmaster tools, i.e. a keyword is supposedly up 50 points then another down 50.  All other 150 keywords that we used to rank on the first page for are not even showing up.

I have a person that is about to do a full link analysis but since we never went after links I just never had the feeling that is where our problem is at, but definitely going to explore it.

The reason for my post is that last night I spoke with an SEO person that has some pretty good credentials (9 years experience and works currently at large online marketing company with seo with clients like Honda) and he was nice enough to just take a quick look at the site.

He said he saw nothing really wrong and did not think that we were hit for any of the normal issues people are listing, i.e. duplicate content, backlinks. His first impression was that we were knocked down because the site is "hard to index".  He said the site still uses tables and a lot of our Doc Statements were for HTML 4.01 from 1999.

As we all know, there are 'many' experts in this industry. So I wanted a little feedback from the community.

Our main site was built in Dreamweaver using tables. We do have a Wordpress blog that is very small and just now posting to add fresh content. (posts seem to rank pretty good, this is why I thought, you know he may be right)

Would an older site be penalized like this for using tables?

What would you do at this stage if you had a site that is not recovering?  I have now reached panic mode and have to do something, just not sure of the next step.

I will be happy to post the URL if anyone wants to help with advice.

Thanks,
Force7

[Force7]

Thanks for the comments Cyrus, I think your post is making me rethink my strategy

I guess I am just tyring to fix the wrong items, I was focusing on other areas because I never really went after backlinks to any degree so I thought how in the world could I be demoted for links.

We have a small online directory where we offered backlinks but we only allowed links that really was a benefit for our customers. Mostly translators who did a service we did not offer.

I think where we got in trouble is we had it set up with a sample link with a keyword in it so they would put a link to us in hopes we would exchange but they were never accepted but they did not remove the link to us.

Our directory only has 65 links after panda/penquin, we had 100 before.

Again thanks, I will focus on the backlinks more now.

Never thought we would be hit by negative seo :-(. So much for doing White Hat all these years.

Force7

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Sorry to hear you got hit by both Panda and Penguin - were there particular keywords that got hit harder than others?

Looking at your backlink profile...http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.translationsoftware4u.com%2F

... I see a number of high quality links. Unfortunately, I also see a huge number of low-quality directory links. For example (I purposely didn't include hyperlinks)

• http://www.premiumsites.org/business/business_services/
• http://www.link-city.com/reciprocal_links/Education.htm

Many of these appear to have been de-indexed in the past few months. I might look for a message in Google Webmaster about unnatural linking activity.

Directory links like these were completely natural a short time ago, but Google has been particularly harsh on them lately, along with article distribution sites, which also make up a significant portion of your backlink profile.

If you can:

1. Try to clean up as many of these types of links as possible
2. Document everything
3. Submit a reconsideration request with Google
4. Wait for their response.

Once you submit a reconsideration request, Google should be a little more specific (although not much) about what they would like you to address. In the meantime, continue to build high quality, authoritative editorial links that your competitors can't match.

Hope this helps, best of luck with your SEO!

[Force7]

We did not receive anyGoogle messages. We did have some blog duplicates where tags created extra copies but those pages still ranked after the Panda/Penquin strikes. Seems it liket he Wordpress area where we have a very small attached blog.

[opri]

many websites got penalized for small duplicated content paragraph , fix all duplicate content and the website will be back , however if you receive any webmaster tools messages , chances that your website will ever recovery are very small. Google just did a wrong step, his search quality is much lower now , I started to use bing more times per day because google is not able to provide me the best results , they block to many websites to be able to show best results.

[opri]

Check webmaster tools again today , it seams that many messages are just sanded today  from google.

[opri]

I did check manually  more sentences from your content

probable are more problems like this , you can check for this more

[Force7]

Oh, how did you find that so quick? I do see a site where it looks like even though they backlinked they 'scraped' sentences from many different websites to create one page.  This is the type of backlink that concerns me, we never ask them for a link, so seems a site like that would be considered unfavorable.

[Force7]

I can easily reduce these.

[opri]

I did notice some duplicate content

this also can be a problem

search on google for

"I bought your European language pack and I'm pleasantly surprised to see what your software can do. I'm an interpreter who speaks 4 languages fluently. While a computer will never replace a human's interpretation and translation skills, it can certainly be a great aid. Of all the different kinds of software I have seen, yours is definitely the best!"

[opri]

It seams that you have the same problem , I know that many people from here will not agree with me , but your generic anchor texts are missing , the generic anchor text are anchors like this : "click here" "read more" "check this out"  "source"   , I did make a lot of investigations over penalized websites and the single difference is this problem.  I recommend you add about 30 generic backlinks, and your website will came back in about 3 weeks.

[Force7]

I usually keep an eye on this and we do not see any duplication.

Site is at www.TranslationSoftware4u.com

The video on the front is going to be replaced with a jquery slider, I have had people say that videos that automatically play are annoying.

Thanks so much for taking the time to comment!

[opri]

Tables are ok , they will not create you problems , are you sure that your content is not stolen ?  try to search some of you content on google using quotes "sentence here"  and if you will see some other websites listed in front of your website than you know that you have "duplicate content penalty".  If this is not the case you can write your URL here so more people will take a look.