Dropped from Google

[danwhitehouse]

Hi all,
One of our sites was dropped from Google back in April. We have a few other sites that follow the same convention that serve the same thing, for different countries. It's 100% legit and a multi million pound business.

Back in April 2011 our site (with a Norwegian CC TLD) was ranking for over 11,000 keywords. Suddenly in May, we dropped to around 600 and traffic went down from about 500 organic visits p/d to around 10, we've not been able to recover ever since.

Things I know..

I'm pretty sure it's not Panda, because why would it affect only one regional site?

W.tools shows no crawl errors.

SEO MOZ pro tools shows only 2 pages crawled out of a possible 10,000 when other sites have 10,000 pages crawled.

Robots.txt is working as it should.

Googlebot can fetch this site as normal.

We've rebuild the link profile over the last year to make sure it's squeaky clean.

Have filed 2 reconsideration requests over the last few months.

Very confused and not sure if I have any more ideas.. Any help?

[tedster]

We've rebuild the link profile over the last year to make sure it's squeaky clean.

A natural backlink profile is not under your control, so I'm suspicious that you had a penalty and made it worse (longer lasting.)

What kind of "not squeaky clean" things did you fix? What kind of steps did you take to achieve the fix?

[Planet13]

Is the site in Norwegian language? Or in English and just geared toward the Norwegian market?

If it is written in Norwegian, is it just a translation of the English language site? Or conversely, if the original site is Norwegian, are there other language versions of the site that are just direct translations of it?

Have filed 2 reconsideration requests over the last few months.

What were the responses from google to those requests?

Also, I agree with tedster; would love to know what type of link building you did prior to this.

[lucy24]

Are we talking about google dot com or google dot no? Or google dot whatever the country really is, if you randomly made up the "Norwegian" part for the sake of obfuscation.

[martinacastro]

@danwhitehouse which kind of response you recieved from google?

[danwhitehouse]

Hi all,
Thanks for your great replies.

The responses we got from Google was that whatever happened, was not as a result of the webspam team. So that leaves it up to the algorithm I presume.

We found that the majority of our natural links were from sites which had been removed, 404 or no longer exist. So it may have been a case of the site was getting benefit from these poor links, but in the end they were removed, in turn removing the small benefit that the site was receiving.

The site is hosted on a .no domain name and is written in Norwegian. We have multiple different language versions such as /en /fr etc, but they are all blocked by Robots.txt so the benefit is given to the 'native' language version only.

I think some of us got a little scared here and went for quantity of quality, for links, and possibly made the situation worse. In any case, nothing has changed for almost a year.

I hope that answers everything, I'll keep this thread open for today.