Indentifying a penalty

Cannot figure out what the penalty could be.

[Ledfish]

I have a website that is in a fairly focused niche market, not super competitive. About July, the traffic from google dropped dramatically. We determined that it was due to a dramatic drop in the rankings, however not having even SEO'd before, we were perplexed at what had happened. Since then we have made many modification trying to determine what was going on.

Some of the things we have paid particular attention to.
1. Dynamic versus Static Content. Increased static 6 fold
2. Titles and Meta Tags - Refined, Refined and Refined again
3. Link Structure - Nice and Smooth, very logical
4. Linking - Seems ok, but google not displaying many backlinks properly or at all. Also, they don't seem to be picking up any of our new links.

After 5 months we have not made up any ground. Also, Florida had no effect on us one way or the other.

Therefore, we have come to the conclusion that there must be a penalty because for our most basic relevant keyword phrase, we are not in the top 100 on Google, but we are #8 on Yahoo and we are regard by customers and competitors as one of the top 5 in our market. Naturally we tried asking google if there was such a penalty, but of course we got the standard e-mail. We have also read googles webmaster guidleines and we conform perfectly, we have also spent many hours here and on other boards, and we are at a point where we have no idea what could be the problem. So our question is, if it is a penalty, what could it possible be? and if it not likely a penalty, then what possibly could be the problem? because none of the revisions have had any effect. I also should mention that our PR from the google toolbar is about 3 or 4 depending on when you check.

If you'd be interested in taking a look and see if you identify the problem, please sticky mail me and I'll provide the url.

[Brett_Tabke]

You had 1 quality link last summer. Then you lost it. Try to figure out what link it was that you lost that laid waste to your pr.

[Ledfish]

Brett

Is that just a guess? Also, A short definition of a quality link? The reason I ask is I can find several links we have from PR 6 and 7 pages.

[Brett_Tabke]

guess - yes, but a pretty sure guess. You wouldn't have lost rankings like that in mid summer last year unless something external happened. The difference between a low pr 7 and a high pr7 is quite profound.

[shawn]

Brett,

How do you know if you have a high PR vs low PR? For example my site has a PR of 5 - how can check to see if ts a high PR of 5 or low.

Shawn

[John_Caius]

If it fluctuates between 4 and 5 then more likely low, if it fluctuates between 5 and 6 then more likely high. What Brett meant was that the effect of an incoming link from a PR7 page will vary according to whether it's a PR7.01 or a PR7.99 page. You basically can't tell, but equally you can't assume that every PR7 link counts the same. It's also affected by the number of links on the page.

[seofreak]

index page PR = the internal pages = higher PR
index page PR > the internal pages = lower PR

[shawn]

index page PR = the internal pages = higher PR
index page PR > the internal pages = lower PR

If I am reading this right, I have have a High PR of 5.

My internal PR of pages are the samr PR as my Index page of 5.

[Ledfish]

One thing I do see as a problem is google not recognizing backlinks. By that I mean that if I do a search for links:www.widgets.com it is a very very small number. but if I do a search for links: www.widgets.com, it jumps ten fold. Anyone understand why this is and if there is anything I can do about it or do I even need to do anything about it?

[antrat]

Ledfish, are you talking about only one page of your site? If so which one?(sticky me the URL and preffered search term) How are the others pages ranking?

It could simply be that Google sees all pages above yours as more relevant. PR 3:4 is not very high and you may just need more links to your problem page.

[Ledfish]

antrat

I've sticky'd you the url and search term.

But the top site under my main term is a 3, the second one is a 4, 3rd is a yahoo directory listing and 4th and 5th are PR 6 sites.

Something very weird happening here.

[seofreak]

link:www.domain.com -> is what is used to find your backlinks

link: www.domain.com -> this means link: and the URL are seperate and it produces results which contain the text www.domain.com whether they are links or not doesn't matter. Most of them might be under PR4 and hence don't show up in your backlink count.

[antrat]

Ok, looking at the URL I would suggest 2 main things

1) Put more text on your homepage that includes your preferred keywords/terms.

2) Get more links pointing to your site.

It *may* also be that your text color and background color are too close. I had a very hard time trying to read your top paragraph on your page. Use H1, H2 etc tags to create a heading that also includes some keywords/terms.

[dirkz]

> I have a website that is in a fairly focused niche market, not super competitive

Of course it all depends on your point of view. But PR three or four is not enough even for most niche markets.