How to tell if a site is being penalized?

[amelen]

Domain: t35.com

I'm hoping someone can figure this out because i'm stumped. Our site, t35.com, is one of the top free web hosts around. Alexa always in top 5,000. PR always above 6. hundreds of thousands of back links (check yahoo). And the domain is 8 years old.

Since about 2 years ago we dropped in rankings for our keywords (free web hosting, free hosting) from top 10, to top 200. At the same time we are still top 10 on other search engines like yahoo.

What seals the deal for me is when you search our company name "t35 hosting", t35 hosting itself is usually not even in the top 100!! What is making me look into this now is that one of our new sites we JUST launched (helpingwebmasters.com) comes up top 10 for "t35 hosting" while t35 hosting itself doesn't make the top 100. Something has to be up.

We never did any kind of SEO stuff (so no blackhat stuff that I have been reading about on here). Never sold links. Never did anything wrong.

Any ideas on how to proceed? I really hope someone on here can figure it out :\

[mcaronan]

Better check first if your site is being banned by google.

Here's one of those site that offers tools that determine whether a site is being banned by google. click here

After that, you should know the policies of google. Because you might have violated some policies.

[amelen]

Checked already.. Def. not being banned. I also read all of the policies like 100 times. Def. never violated any of them Anything else it could be? The only thing I can think of is that t35.com was a topsites list 8 years ago (and hosting was hosting.t35.com), but the topsites list has been gone for 7 years now.. it shouldn't randomly start impacting it, right?

[mcaronan]

Hmm... Did you regularly update your site?? If not, do it so... Then after updating your site submit your site to lots and lots of free web directories so that you can have traffic.. This method is called link building. There are many ways to link build..

[amelen]

Yup, site regularly updated and we're already in most of the major web directories just because we've been around so long.

Yahoo site explorer:

Inlinks 1 - 100 of about 3,687,759 - 0 sec.

[mcaronan]

Hmmm... Try to subscribe to different forums and post your link through your signature. Just like mine below. It will help. Do link exchange with other webmasters similar to your site.

Another thing, when did this occur??? If this is your first time to experience it, you might experience what we called google dance.

The name "Google Dance" has often been used to describe the index update of the Google search engine. Google's index update occurred on average once per month. During an index update there was significant movement in search results and Google showed new backward links for pages. However, in mid-2003 Google started to update it's index continuously. It appears that, still, there has to be an update of the complete index once in a while and during this time new backward links are shown. But, because of the continuous update, the effects on search results seem to be rather insignificant. Read more about google dance

You can visit this to identify google dance

[amelen]

This is the first time I noticed this.. we've never really kept track of the google rankings since we get enough business from word of mouth.. but it would be nice to be back in top 10 on google like we used to be..

I've never hard of google dance, i'll def. read up on it. Although we've always had a pretty consistent amount of backlinks.. hmm

Thanks!

[mcaronan]

Always nice to help...

[bogs]

if your site lost index... and all your rankings fall... there you can say your site is banned... but observe for a few days.... sometimes its usually normal...

[amelen]

It's not completely banned.. i'm still there, just lost a lot of rankings. it's been like this for at least a year.

[interwebhunt]

have you submitted sitemaps to google?

[amelen]

Yes, recently in hopes it would help. Hasn't done much yet though.

[theawristocrat]

if its nowhere to be found in google

[redspace]

i think your site is being penalized of some kind because of your backlink. the last time i check it is more than one million. and if you take a look at the link it is not coming from link related to your niche. and most of the domain has a lot link to your site. it is like a link farm. and maybe your own most of the domain. if it not yours ask the owner to pull out your link. don't link to any site that create a lot of link from just i submission. i previously make a comment at a blog but what i got is more than 50 link from them.

[amelen]

Well we put ads on member pages.. so all member pages technically link back to us. You think it's doing more harm then good?

[redspace]

if it has been like that for quite some time yeah why not you pull out some of the link. i just take a look at the yahoo backlink and you manage to pull out almost all of them. it already come down to Pages (7,760,19 | Inlinks (1,021). what i would do is check which common pages on your site maybe such as forum member profile pages that has a little bit high PR at least 1. put your homepage link on this pages. and then build link from other's web hosting forum. i haven't seen to many link from article directories. if you haven't use it that much why not start submit a little bit. do it for 1 month and keep tracking your ranking on the 3 major player. make the numbers of your backlink and site pages as realistic as possible. just think like this. do you think google or yahoo want to calculate on millions of pages just to calculate PR for one site when there a millions of website. it would just waste their resources. so they must think of something for their own good. okay that is my opinion. i'm not seo expert so please don't believe me totally. do more research on this. wish you luck.

i've check again and i just notice that above value is for t35.com so that would include other subdomain. the value for wwwdott35dotcom is
(15,801) | Inlinks (1,233,016). anyway you know what i meant already. so try to do the 'real' thing.

[amelen]

Thanks! It's just weird that we're top 10 for all the keywords on yahoo but get penalized so badly on google! (not even top 100 for our own company name most of the time!). I'll try doing some article submissions and stuff.. but we already have a good amount of high PR sites linking back to us.. just by being around for almost a decade.. you get a lot of sites linking to you ..

[mcaronan]

Hey... What's up?? How is your site now??? Did it improve?? Continuous submitting new feeds to your site plus adding more link builds will surely help you. Just invest on more quality links and sooner you'll be on the top again.

[amelen]

Well.. it seems like we have enough links.. esp. since it's enough to be top 10 on yahoo for the very competitive hosting keywords.. i still feel google is penalizing heavily for something.. i'm just not sure what it is.

[ezhel]

here try to read this article Click