Am I Being Penalized For Having My Whole Site In A Subfolder Named With A Keyword?
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I inherited a client. For some reason, their previous webmaster set up the site so everything is in a subfolder /law/. It's an attorney website.
All the urls have the primary domain name /law/ and then assigned url. I can't image this is helping but could the site be penalized for this by Google or Bing?
It's set up like this:
www.attorneysite.com**/law/**therestoftheurl
/law/ is included in EVERY PAGE... even the homepage.
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I do not see any violation of Google or Bing guidelines with that URL setup. I would not necessarily recommend doing it, but if your client did it would not be a violation as stated.
Based on your question, it seems the site is penalized. There is a lot more details required to diagnose the penalty. Some initial ideas can be generated from a few basic questions:
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on what date was the site penalized?
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how was the site penalized? Was the entire site removed from the index? Or certain pages / keywords?
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was there any notice received in WMT?
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are there any known violations of the guidelines? poor content? manipulative links? other issues?
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