Google Punished two of my URLs - for specific keywords

[atlantis76]

Hi All

"Punishment" for a specific URL for a specific keyword might have been already discussed here, if so - I'd love to see where.

My case:

Two URLs, each on mysite.ccTLD (FI, ES - in this case), used to be well ranked for certain keywords, in the corresponding local Google. One URL is the index page, and the other is an inner page.

When searching these keywords now both URLs are no longer coming up for the corresponding searches. Sometimes, other URLs from that sites do appear in lower positions for that searches.

One keyword that was punished is of high competition, the other is rarely searched for.

When searching other keywords: business as usual.

Rounding up the usual suspects, my link building strategy is based of getting not only relevant, on-topic link. Do you think this was what messed me up here?

Thanks
Assaf

[BoBoMisiu]

Yes, from the art field:
The brand is the artist identified by name.
The product is the piece of art identified by title.
Both name and title are likely to be only one or two words.
Internal links don't have qualifiers.
The problem is that a page describing the piece of art uses an image of the artwork and very little text.
The artists supply the image and the text so several websites have identical content. My clients are stuck not having unique content on their sites that actually sell the artwork compared to social networking pages about the artists. The result is no top ten ranking.

[tedster]

Hello BoBoMisiu, and welcome to the forums.

You are describing a common situation for websites in the visual arts - painting, photography, lithographs and so on. The difference is that Google is not "punishing" these sites (as the opening post in this thread is discussing), they simply don't have enough factors to index and rank its pages.

My clients are stuck not having unique content on their sites

It's good that you recognize this - now sell the message to your clients. Even ranking on Image Search will depend on other relevance cues you can give in actual on-page text.

I assume it's true that this website NEVER ranked well, rather than that it once did rank and was later penalized - correct?

[vetofunk]

Love it when you come back from vacation and your top keyword drops off the map. Well the top keyword for my client, been #1 in Google for over 4 years and then on August 20th not in the top 200. Replaced by a recent new article from usnews.com. Still #1 in Caffeine and #1 when you put it in quotes.

Funny thing is that I haven't been pushing this specific term in links for months.

Things I am thinking about doing:

1/ Reviewing all the recip links using this phrase and change link text.
2/ Change link text of any directories we are listed on with this exact phrase.
3/ Remove internal link to the homepage that has this phrase (currently we use this phrase instead of "home" in footer of each page).

Any other ideas?

Thanks

[cangoou]

Okay, this is really a joke: I had some domains affected with this effect. I tried almost everything what was suggested here: Even differen things on different pages to test the result.

And tonight, almost every keyword came back - No matter if I did something or if I did nothing. Was this really all a big 4-month-google-hiccup?!?!