Figuring out why a domain is penalized

[onetry]

Completely white hat domain.

I got a hard penalty about 7 months ago.

My domain and sub-domains ARE in the Google index but they got a sort of -x penalty and also when searching for a keyword, I can find in SERPs another page of my site indexed instead of the correct one.

When domain got penalty, I fixed thousands of broken outbound links because a mysql server error.

The very painful thing is that after 7 months nothing changed.

I often do a reinclusion request and try to understand:

1) Was this the cause ?
2) If yes, now all is fixed so why the don't come back ?
3) If no, which is the cause ?

please help me in this case.

Regards.

[tedster]

There are so many possibilities - I appreciate your frustration. When it comes to outbound links, it's good to fix the 404s. But broken links are not nearly so deadly as links to domains that may have swithced owners and are now part of a "bad neighborhood".

You said thousands of extenral links, and I know this kind of check can be a lot of work - but it's worth doing.

when searching for a keyword, I can find in SERPs another page of my site indexed instead of the correct one.

Would you clarify this a bit further? Is the "correct page not even in the index, or is it just not the URL that comes back in the search results for that particular query.

[onetry]

There are so many possibilities - I appreciate your frustration. When it comes to outbound links, it's good to fix the 404s. But broken links are not nearly so deadly as links to domains that may have swithced owners and are now part of a "bad neighborhood".

Thanks for the info. I'll for sure give it a look.

Would you clarify this a bit further? Is the "correct page not even in the index, or is it just not the URL that comes back in the search results for that particular query.

The correct page IS in the index but for a particular query I can see, very bad positioned, only my homepage and not the optimized page.

I also tried to dramatically reduce optimization for that query with no success.

Any help appreciated.

[tedster]

This is a relatively common frustration - seeing the Home Page rank for query when there is a much better internal page for the topic. I've wrestled with this quite often, and the successes I've had seem to depend more on Google tweaking their algo, rather than any actions I've taken.

Since anchor text is used as an on-page factor as well as an off-page factor, having a link on your Home page with the query terms in the anchor text will help both your pages, and not just the internal page. So on site, it is important to link to that internal page from other appropriate internal pages.

Getting enough PR on the internal page to make it competitive on that query seems to be the key - and that means backlinks from other domains are more valuable than anything you can do on your own site.