9 replies to this topic

[webbestlive]

Currently I have a website that was climbing well on the search engines.

The website is indexed, that is when you use Site:, it is there and is not in any way blacklisted or sand boxed, yet the key phrases which we are pushing for and the URL I cannot find with my chosen keyphrase.

In fact with our chosen key phrase, the only trace is at position 80 but with the URL,
example.co.uk/information_pulled_from_the_database

Does anyone have any ideas why this would be happening?

[Jill]

Most likely you need more time, more content and more links.

Just because you have keywords in the URLs doesn't mean those pages will show up for those words. SEO is a whole lot more than that. In fact, the keywords in the URLs is only a very minor signal to the search engines, and you need to use hyphens not underscores, as well.

You may want to read our Tips for Newbies articles to understand more about SEO.

[davidbrett]

Patience and Persistance is the key. You need to continue to do the right things and in time you will get there. The tips on this forum will be very helpful

[colorado1]

My suggestion is to build up more content on your site and add more relevant pages to the keyword topic. Once you start generating relevant, useful content that intelligently covers the topic of your site it's bound to get indexed and gain some higher rankings. Think of your website project as an outline. Build out your additional web pages with topics that support your main topic on your home page. Obviously also you need some inbound links to your home page too and you might try some of the social media sites and create a business profile such as Twitter or Linked in which can then be linked to your main site. Hope some of this helps and good luck.

[JeremyQ]

How competitive is your keyword(s)? You can use the google keyword tool to figure that out.

[brianman]

Were you ever ranking high for those keywords? If so, you probably got hit by Panda, Google's recent game-changing algorithm. Panda addresses low-quality and duplicate content on the web and hits your entire site if your content is not unique. But, if you have not ever ranked better than 80, you just need more content on your site and off your site.

[Mikl]

Panda addresses low-quality and duplicate content on the web and hits your entire site if your content is not unique.

Are you sure about that?

My understanding is that Google does not penalise an entire site for duplicate content. When it finds two similar or identical pages, it will tend to show the one that it considers more relevant to the searcher's needs, but it won't completely disregard the other one.

[Michael Martinez]

Are you sure about that?

My understanding is that Google does not penalise an entire site for duplicate content. When it finds two similar or identical pages, it will tend to show the one that it considers more relevant to the searcher's needs, but it won't completely disregard the other one.

Google says that a Panda "downgrade" is not a penalty -- not in the sense that algorithmic or manual penalties are defined. According to all that they have been willing to disclose thus far, if enough pages on your site (or the right pages on your site, I suppose) are downgraded by Panda, they can drag the entire site down. Danny Sullivan has suggested that people should think of it as a page-level factor or score. Perhaps it is used to modify page-level valuations which add up across large sites to substantial devaluations.

I have seen various sources claim that Panda was directed at duplicate content. Even if that were clear beyond all doubt, Google has (in)conveniently neglected to mention what it considers to be "duplicate" content and how it detects that. We can easily agree on some obvious types of duplicate content (such as replicating entire sites across multiple domain names) but the more differentiation you introduce to individual pages, the murkier the whole process becomes.

[fastreplies]

Google has (in)conveniently neglected to mention what it considers to be "duplicate" content and how it detects that. We can easily agree on some obvious types of duplicate content (such as replicating entire sites across multiple domain names) but the more differentiation you introduce to individual pages, the murkier the whole process becomes.

I think Google does.
It doesn’t want us to create the same page under different headings as for example
/free-directories-list
and
/list-of-free-directories and use exact content thus duplicating existing one.

Penalties could be avoided if you’re using redirect from one page to another or use nofollow tags in second.

As to similar content across multiple domains, Google won’t penalize you because it understands that any
schmak competitor can duplicate your site to take it down.

fastreplies

[Michael Martinez]

I feel that Google looks at duplicate content in more ways than most people realize.