New site lost ranking for all its keywords

[iCyborg]

Hi WebmasterWorlds :)

I had purchased a domain on 20nd May and had started working day and night on a site (with 4 writers). Till 10th of august, the site had 1500+ pages, most of them fairly good. Since the content was targeting towards less popular keywords, very quickly we managed to get in Google #2 to #8 for many keywords. It was so nice but suddently on 13th of August, the site stared to drop in traffic and started to lose all its ranking.

Now it has lost all its ranking for all its keywords.

Its ranking at No 16 for its own domain name and mysite.wordpress.com and squidoo.com/mysite are ranking at top (which I had created few weeks back in the hope of getting some backlink), so its a clear example of my site getting penalzed. But for what ?

I had created a wordpress blog and started posting in it daily with links back to my site, did that caused the problem ? I did the same with my personal blog too and started linking on daily basis with new posts.

I have applied for reconsideration through google webmaster tools and have nofollowed all the links from my blog and the mysite.wordpress.com blog.

What else I can do ? how to get my rankings again ?

Thanks

[tedster]

Hello iCyborg, and welcome to the forums.

so its a clear example of my site getting penalzed. But for what ?

Maybe not a true penalty - especially if you're not aware of violating any guidelines. For a new site, it's pretty common to see a short period of good rankings followed by a disappearance - and then a gradual climb back.

Here's a related thread from June of this year: ew pages indexed, de-indexed, re-indexed - is this normal? [webmasterworld.com].

[iCyborg]

well I was trying to be too smart and was keeping keyword density of 3%, was repeating keyword 3-4 times in the description too with over usage of H2 tags in body.

I also have some low quality pages (around 1200 out of 2000), so should I remove all these low quality pages ?

Regards, just reading WebmasterWorld for the past 4 hours and great info here.

[iCyborg]

OK, I manually checked the rankings for our nations google.xx - here are some of the rankings -

keyword1 - #2 to #75
keyword2 - #5 to #428 something

Do you have any idea how long it can take to get back ? will you advice to submit articles on squidoo and ezine to build links ? should I add more content to the site or should I completely stop for few weeks ?

[tedster]

Definitely don't stop your website development. If this is what I think it is, over the next few months you'll see a return of decent ranking.

Definitely loosen up on the KW density restrictions and let the vocabulary flow naturally. Same thing with h2 tags - use them naturally as true subtopics and don't force them into situations where they wouldn't really be natural to the page content.

[Thaparian]

This loose in rankings happened many times to my sites, (maybe cos of link building or over optimization seo) but i keep on improving my sites, adding more content, making things better for users, and after a month or two, Bingo!, sites get back up where they wrere before, after this sites don't usually drop unless i do something stupid.

[iCyborg]

What kind of over optimization you are talking about thaparian ? Have u find out things which triggers site loosing rankings ?

[tedster]

I'm not sure what Thaparian has discovered specifically, but you will find many penalty discussion in the Hot Topics are [webmasterworld.com], which is always pinned to the top of this forum's index page.

There are many ways to run into problems when you start trying to influence Google's rankings.

[Thaparian]

I interlinked my own sites. Around 8 of them, with relavent topics.
I was targetting one keyword phrase for each site.
I used the same anchor text for same urls.
Around 5 sites penalized. Rankings drop by 100 positions.
I removed all the outlinks on all sites.

One site recovered 2 days back. Other sites will take more time, cos those sites are newer and have less content and no PR.

I was once penalized after i started showing lot of ads on my site. (I think high bounce rate was the reason)
I placed 3 ad units back to back. My earnings increased 200%, but after two weeks, site had 950 penalty, then my earnings were 10%, lol, i reduced ads to normal, added more content, build some backlinks, site recovered after 3 months.

[iCyborg]

"I interlinked my own sites. Around 8 of them, with relavent topics".

I see a pattern here as I too had done the same thing. Anyway I have nofollowed the links (will nofollow all the links from same ip now)

[JudgeJeffries]

<Moved from another location>

I put up a new websites but was tardy on adding content and when googlebot visited it got the apache default page which showed on a domain name search. I then put the content up and the content then showed. Today its back to the apache content. I put another new website up that showed and ranked in its full glory having half a dozen half decent links immediately - today , a few days later its not there at all - whats going on.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 5:11 pm (utc) on Sep. 19, 2008]