Google De-Indexed Our SIte for Branded Terms?

[eugeneku]

Hello all,

As of 10am Pacific on September 12th, 2013, my team has noticed that our site, www.wirelessemporium.com, does not show up on the first 5 or 6 pages of SERPs for branded terms like "wireless emporium." We have not received any messages from Google via Webmaster Tools regarding this. Major activity that we've been doing to our site is updating content, meta tags, and h1 tags, along with removing/301 redirecting certain pages that did not meet Google quality guidelines. We've also been purging our backlink portfolio of toxic links and URLs, both manually and through the disavow tool. No blackhat has been done to this site for a very long time (more than 8 months now).

One thing to note is that we did have a manual spam penalty placed on us back in July of 2012, it expired in early August of 2013 after a reconsideration request was submitted, and a 2nd manual spam penalty was placed on us again later that month. We are submitting a 2nd reconsideration request this Monday.

Could this or the recent Panda update have anything to with this? We are very much in need of opinions as to why this is happening to our site.

5adbd14a31de3a78b998df94f0b6d2be

[Dr-Pete]

Yeah, given that your brand looks pretty strong and you even have a Knowledge Graph entry, not ranking for exact-match brand terms (even in quotes, at least for me) is a very bad sign.

When you asked about Panda, did you mean Penguin 2.1? It's definitely possible for a site as large as yours to be hit by Panda (because of duplicate content, thin content, etc.), but that would typically manifest in a loss of long-tail traffic, ranking dilution, and other more subtle or isolated signs. When you can't get your home-page to rank for brand terms, that's almost always penalty-scale and often link-based. Penguin is entirely possible, but Panda is very unlikely to cause this.

However, since you've got a second penalty notice in play, speculating about Penguin isn't really worthwhile. You know Google has a problem with your link profile, and they're telling you flat out that you didn't clean it up enough. Honestly, you're going to have to be aggressive - being re-penalized could be worse, and if Google thinks you're playing games, or you just ask for reconsideration without showing a serious effort to cull bad links, they're going to only get more and more suspicious.

Are you ranking for much of anything? I'm not able to find you for "cell phone accessories" and similar terms, either.

[DennisSeymour]

Definitely from the penalty. I've seen it countless times. Branded sites that wont show up for brand keywords, ugh, hate seeing that when potential clients approach us.

[SErOb]

You really got hammered on September 3rd.

"We are submitting a 2nd reconsideration request this Monday."

Good luck - just keep at it!