Please give me advice on how to get this page back into search engines

[ClaireH-184886]

Hi. Before we had our site www.in2town.co.uk upgraded, we had this section on the first page of google and even though it does not badly with other search engines, with google we are not in the top fifty.

the page is http://www.in2town.co.uk/gastric-band-hypnotherapy

i would be so grateful for advice on how to get this section back into google

i am also concerned that i have a category called gastric band hypnotherapy, what i mean is,

http://www.in2town.co.uk/gastric-band-hypnotherapy/crash-diets-can-damage-your-health-says-gastric-band-hypnosis-expert

as you can see from above, we have the category name which is gastric band hypnotherapy and then the article name, just wondering if this is damaging us.

any help to sort our ranking issue our would be amazing

[ClaireH-184886]

cheers for that

[evolvingSEO]

Hi - I think changing it back couldn't hurt to minimize the possible over-optimization signals.

-Dan

[ClaireH-184886]

hi, the title of the menu link was Hypno Gastric Band  for some reason the developer changed it to gastric band hypnotherapy. do you feel this should be changed back or come up with a new menu link

[evolvingSEO]

Hi Tim

Yup, take a look at this screenshot --> http://screencast.com/t/6j9zPt8ck1YL - that menu link did not exist on your old site (to my knowledge). This creates 100's of internal links on your new site with the anchor text "gastric band hypnotherapy" targeting a page /gastric-band-hypnotherapy - which also has exact match backlinks pointing to it.

Just my theory, but I believe possibly the addition of this sitewide internal link may have been enough to trigger some sort of overoptimization signal to Google.

-Dan

[ClaireH-184886]

the developer which i got rid of, was supposed to make sure that the staging was not indexed, i have put a do not follow in the robots file last week as i was not aware of the problem before that, not sure how to now get google to get rid of all the staging, i have been trying to find out in my site where he has redirected the staging but cannot find the place, this is causing me problems as many live articles under staging are going to the home page, so i really do not know what to do now.

can you explain more on the below

the new site has a sitewide anchor text link "gastric band hypnotherapy" in the main menu, whereas the old site did not. Google takes the overoptimized back links, adds it up with the new overoptimized internal links and that could have triggered something.

since the upgrade the whole site bombed in the rankings while before that the site was fine

[evolvingSEO]

Hi There

When you upgraded the site did the URL change or did it stay the same? I noticed you also have a lot of your staging site indexed (probably unintentionally) but I would suggest getting that noindexed.

I do see they all redirect to the homepage of your site, but this might not be the best thing to do, since there is not a great topic relevancy going from deep pages redirecting to the homepage. I would just add meta robots noindex tags to them and not redirect them.

I think I answered my question, as I see the archive.org version of the page from a few months ago - the URL is the same but just with capital letters. This is sending through a 301 redirect, but I doubt enough is lost with that.

Unfortunately your back links seem to have an unnatural amount of commercial anchor text, especially for the page in question. So I am willing to bet perhaps when you upgraded the site, it may have "stirred the pot" a little and Google looked a little closer at the site.

I think the "final straw" may have to do with the fact the new site has a sitewide anchor text link "gastric band hypnotherapy" in the main menu, whereas the old site did not. Google takes the overoptimized back links, adds it up with the new overoptimized internal links and that could have triggered something.

Another question - did your rankings drop sitewide? Just for this page?

-Dan