mhansen - 10:24 pm on Nov 18, 2012 (gmt 0)

Our Penguin effected site is very tightly focused, and until April 24th, led its specific niche in ranking for just about everything on the topic, where informational queries were involved. (consumer buying guides site, expert level content, we sold the products face to face for 15 years, however they are rarely sold online.)

Since April - almost every page of our site resides at "end of results", aka -950 penalty. (Although some kind of change seems to be in the wind since Friday and through the weekend, no ranking change, just placement changes)

In our case, we feel it's got to be more than just links or too much seo. The thing we see over and over is that the first page of serps is now filled with a few specific big-brand sites. Almost as if Google feels they have found the best resource for informational queries about these "the-widget", and all else is a distraction.

We're obviously missing something on our end. Google has said the site in question is not manually penalized, but the same pages which are at end of results in Google.com, are in the top 10 at Foxstart. (which uses a Google feed, obviously pre-filtered) We have a few 1500+ word buying guides for 2012 that don't even rank for on-page content, yet our Facebook page (with only the title of the page) ranks in top 3.

We have thrown everything at this site to try and help... It's the only site we manage that was hit on April 24th 2012, and unfortunately, it was also the site we thought we were doing everything right on. Truly makes you question your efforts of following all the guidelines. Also unfortunate, is that we have simply abandoned it at this point, and will not touch it again unless it shows signs of life. All our effort has done is cost us traffic from other engines while trying to please Google. We give...

MH