Website very erratic on Google

[bostonseo]

I launched my website just over a year ago, it is a static .html site with excellent SEO structure and fundamentals. It is in a very competitive industry so I'm not expecting first page results on top industry searches, but here is what seems odd.

Starting about 3 months ago, I saw less competitive phrases ranking on the first and second page for about 4 or 5 days and then my rankings dropped completely. It's as if Google removed all the pages from the index. The next month the same thing happened - good results for a couple of days and then nowhere to be found for another month. This has happened every month for the last 3 months.

Any ideas on what would cause this? The one weak thing in my SEO strategy is lack of quality inbound links. But I can't imagine why a lack of links would cause me to go up and down in the rankings like I've detailed.

Any thoughts?

Thanks

[colin_h]

>>>> The one weak thing in my SEO strategy is lack of quality inbound links <<<<

Hi bostonseo,

I wondering if you have got any interlinking going on. Have you interlinked between several of your own sites? If so, you may be picking up a short term penalty for some infringement.

It does sound to me like you are being picked up by each monthly intake and then getting a small 30 day penalty for something. It might be worth approaching google with an honest question regarding penalties ... it's better to try rather than sit and wait.

You should try [google.com...] & be as honest and truthful as possible. Always say that you need their help and always say thanks at the end. KSA, it helps in these situations ;-)

All the best

Col ;-)

[bostonseo]

I only have one other website and yes I do link to it. I can't imagine that would result in a penalty. The thing I think it might be is multiple pages with basically the same text copy. It's a site where I have say a page for each town in Florida and the only thing I switch on each page is the town name.

Thanks for the link, I should ask them if they can be of any help.

[truezeta]

Sounds like you are getting penalized. Switching the name of the town doesn't make original content.

[walkman]

>> Sounds like you are getting penalized. Switching the name of the town doesn't make original content.

I agree. Seems like either a thin affiliate, a duplicate penalty, or both.

[bostonseo]

Thanks for the input. It's a toss-up to try and fix this and risk the excellent rankings I have on MSN and Yahoo with no gurantee that more original content will result in consistent first page Google results.

[minnapple]

I had a client that operated two ecom sites that sold the same product line. What a nightmare.

They duo sites really seemed to hurt each other even after many attempts were made to make each one unique to a degree.

After much frustration with the duo sites, we did a noindex nofollow on one of the sites, basically leaving it cold on the side of the road. Couldn't kill it completely because there some affilate stuff going on.

The results was that the single site alone out performed the duo sites in terms of sales.

Somehow Google knew these site were related and would only rank one of them at any given time. Each time one fell out of favor the other one took a month to fall into favor.

Once again, it was a nightmare.

[bostonseo]

The 2 websites I operate are not alike at all...totally different industries. Hard to figure out what is going on, but again could be because of lack of original content which I am working on.