Home Page Not Ranking... Need an EXPERT

[trophycentraltrophiesandawards]

Hi, for about a year now, our home page seems to have been "removed" from Google (except for our branded keywords).  The home page is clearly indexed, but none of the keywords for the home page rank in the top 500 (again, except for our brand, trophycentral).  Other pages in the site are fine and we rank in the top 10 positions for hundreds of keywords.  We are also okay on Yahoo and Bing.  So the issue is the home page from non-branded words.  There have been no manual penalties, but since the words, such as trophies and trophies and awards are all but gone, something is going on.  It has been almost exactly a year now and I have tried everything from removing backlinks (although I still can't tell which are "bad links", to changing titles, to improving speed and structure.  I have had quite a few really nice people try to help, but their suggestions don't seem to work or are too vague.  I really need an expert as the impact to the business of not having a home page performing is very damaging.  Thank you!!!

[trophycentraltrophiesandawards]

Hi Matthew, thanks very much for your reply.  I wish I knew where some of the bad backlinks came from - I have hired a couple of seo companies over the past 10 years but thought they were highly reputable.  In terms of the dropped links over the last year, this was done after the problems with Google started.  We had hundreds of links coming from two sources - our search provider who was saving search pages with our header, etc. and our hosting site where we store our engraving files, etc.  I was actually pretty sure these were causing the problem, because there were over a thousand links from these two locations.  I thought they might have viewed them as spam even though they were not, but removing them didn't seem to do anything.

Out of curiosilty, how were you able to see the change in links - is there a sw program that you recommend?

In terms of the new backlinks to the site, I "panicked" and started adding more (at the recommendation of someone on this site!) and hired network solutions to add us to more directories.  I stopped the service last month.  I also have been writing a bunch of articles and press releases.

Is there something that can help tell me which backlinks are "bad"?

Thanks again!

[trophycentraltrophiesandawards]

Thanks, Stephen.  I will look at the links to see if I can increase the links back to the home page.  In terms of the speed, there must have been something off on my site when you looked - it is slow, but using google webmaster tools appears to be much less (under 2 seconds).  Thanks also for th referral to Alan...

[MarketingOfAmerica]

Hello,

I will do my best to help you, but there are many reasons why you may not be rankings.

After doing a research I started to find links like this to your site  http://www.casinoreviewpages.com/?category=Shopping_10

I can tell you that this isn't going to help do anything but hurt your site.  I am not a trophy expert, but I know that trophies aren't relevant to casino reviews.  I found many questionable links like this.

Not to mention the fact that you lost thousands of backlinks to your site in the past year.

I feel that your building to many backlinks per month to your site, and I don't feel the quality of your backlinks are good enough.

I highly recommend the following.  I feel you should take a month or 2 and remove all bad links to your site.  Run a detox report as a start.  A detox will get some, but not all.  Make sure you review all links from a detox report too, some are still good.  I would then start to build high quality backlinks to your site.

It looks like your using some kind of software for submissions purposes too.  I also seen very low quality writing to your site.

I recommend hiring good writers, find someone that is willing to manually submit, make sure that what is submitted is to relevant sites.  I would also make sure that all sites submitted to are high quality and not just a submission to submit.

Did a SEO company do this for you? I know that we have never done anything like this before and am sure that what they did isn't very ethical or white hat, because none of the tactics used are in our playbook here.  I would start only submitting to quality sites.

Have a great night and I hope this helps.

Matthew Boley

[SteveTheWoodsman]

After giving it a cursory review, I drew a few conclusions:

you've got a lot of links but need a higher majority of them to go to the home page.

You've also got a really slow site: 13.2 seconds on the load time... that'll hurt you.

But at the end of the day, with all the work you've already done and all the help that you've received, you really don't need more people on forums trying to shoot in the dark... as you said: you need an expert.  You need to hire a company to do a thorough and exhaustive site audit.  Expect it to run $1k+.  You need someone like Alan or any of the other excellent auditors that can help you get back on the right track and fast.