Thread: google rating not going back up

Since August 2008 we’re experiencing a drop in search results due to what seems like a penalty of some sort on our website (url is in my profile)We immediately understood something was wrong with our website. We did the following steps to resolve this drop in ranking:

– checking our Google Webmaster Tools account to look for abnormalities
– checking our Google Analytics account to look for abnormalities

Both came up with nothing and then we started reading the Google Guidelines and numerous threads on Google Groups to figure out what was wrong with our website. We came up with the following list of problems:

Wrong title - we adjusted the titles so that the topics of the various pages are clear and unique
No follow tag – we placed the rel=“nofollow” on every place where the Google guidelines say it’s necessary.
Inter linking – We removed the inter linking to our other websites. The only links remaining are those at related content pages.
Numerous index page: we put a redirect on our website and removed default.aspx and home.aspx
Canalization: we made every link without www so that all the links are the same.
Content: We removed the lastminute deals from the homepage. We now only publish related content on the homepage.
Reciprocal link exchanges - We removed the reciprocal links from our site. We only link to related websites that have much value for our visitors.

After fixing these problems, we filed a reconsideration in September 2009. Unfortunately, our ranking didn't improved. After a few months we looked again at the problem with a fresh view and then came to the conclusion that a bad linkprofile could be the cause of our problem. In May 2010 we identified all the links pointing to our website and put them in a spreadsheet. We systematically reviewed the links and took action when link were inappropriate. Almost all of the webmasters agreed to remove these links.

We understand that we made some serious mistakes in the past. It took us two long years to figure out was what wrong. But now is the moment that we finally are 100% confident that our website isn't violating the Google Guidelines. We provide unique, relevant and useful content on Tuscany and we will continue to do that. Any future improvements on the website will be in accordance with the Google Guidelines.

We can only blame ourselves for the penalty that caused our small company so much trouble. But we are confident that, with this reconsideration request, our ranking will improve.

This is what i sent to google over a year ago but our ranking never went up. Does anybody have an idea what we can do to get our ranking back up? (My URL is in my profile.)

Wow, this is one of the worst sandbox stories I have ever herd! The best way is to backlink until no end try some blackhat ideas as well.

[QUOTE=contentwriter;19838]Wow, this is one of the worst sandbox stories I have ever herd! The best way is to backlink until no end try some blackhat ideas as well.[/QUOTE]

Yeah, blackhat methods are a sure way to get out of the sandbox.......

What else would you suggest for someone who has been in the sandbox for two years! I would try anything at that point.

Keep at it, keep improving the quality and relevance of your backlinks, keep talking to Google to remove yourself from the sandbox. And, most importantly, don't give them a reason to keep you in there.

If you attend conferences frequented by Google Engineers, you could try pulling one aside and asking them to look into your case, but you better be squeaky clean. And you need to increase your backlink portfolio of "good" links.

Things have changed with Google over the years and it could just be it doesn't view your site as being authoritative enough to rank.

Are you getting any traffic at all from Google?

Have you tried looking at your website like you were Googlebot using a tool like FoxyProxy or something like that to see if you've been the victim of any SQL injection attacks? This happened to a client of mine and when you viewed the site as Googlebot it was full of porn links that weren't visible to the normal user.

Related to the above, are you getting strange keyword referrals in your analytics (ie: p0rn, viagra, etc) that would suggest the above.

Never give up in enhancing your website, google is only doing its job prove to them that in the past two years your site is still in its title and descriptions content and still updating, its surrounding text to be more related to the keywords that you have this will be as strong as you can as a competitor.

we try to avoid all the blackhat methods because we really want to be a clean organisation.
We do get some traffic from google but this isn't more then 15 people a month. Our google analytics doesn't show any strange keywords so i don't think we have been the victim of any attack on our website.

We looked at our site using googlebot and don't get any weird messages, everything looks as it should be.

The problem is that we live in holland and there is no way to get in contact with google, not even to ask them why our rating doesn't go up or why it dropped in the first place. I understand that with over hundreds of millions of sites this would have been difficult foor google, but it would be nice.

Even in the US it's impossible to talk with a Google Engineer unless you know one of them.

I've never heard anyone tried to talk with the google engineer with similar to the problem above by oelie because it is complicated and if anyone does many people will approach them and the scenario it will be worst.