Urgent Help Needed With Reconsideration - Thin Content Penalty

[Ecopac]

Hi Guys

I am in desperate need of some help. 2 weeks ago I received a Manual Penalty from Google for 'Thin Content' on my website.

I have since had 2 reconsiderations rejected, the latest coming this morning.

I am literally at a point where I just don't know what else to do, and I need your help.

A couple of things before I move on, I work in the <very competitive financial niche> industry which I appreciate may be an issue for some, but I am not a spammer. I have been running my business/website for 2 years - I don't offer <products>, just affiliate with the actual <suplier> and offer the public a site to come to when they want to avoid the brokers that do actually spam.

Because of the nature of what I do, I appreciate I am under constant scrutiny of Google, but I have always played by their rules, I no follow everything and NEVER build any links. I am just a normal person trying to make a living and at the moment Google is on it's way to putting me out of business.

So, here's the deal, I own this website <snip> and it's been up and running about 18 months. Everything has been going great until this penalty.

Everything on my site has been written by me, everything is unique 100%. I have over 70 pages on the site and these are my stats from Google Analytics from mid August to mid September:

Visits: 33,663 Pageviews: 213,285 Pages/Session: 6.34 Duration: 00:05:09 Bounce Rate: 15%

Now in my opinion, a site with those kind of stats surely wouldn't be considered to have Thin Content - people are obviously reading the posts on the site and spending a decent amount of time there.

I have read, watched and digested every piece of info they give you about Thin Content and I just cannot see how my site fits into any of that. There's no doorway pages, no scraped content, no jibberish, it just doesn't make sense to me.

I am at the point now where I genuinely do not know what they want from me. I have made changes but obviously they're not enough. I cannot just add more content - there is no need to.

If you are in the UK, search <very competitive phrase> and look at some of the competition I have - they have FAR less information on their sites but have not received a penalty, and just yesterday I came across this website <snip> which is an almost exact copy of my website - and it's indexed and starting to rank.

I haven't slept for nearly 2 weeks now, it's really affecting my life and I am seriously concerned I am not going to be able to get this website back.

Please, can you look past the nature of the industry I work in and and look at this from a webmaster point of view - what more do I need to do to get out of this penalty?

I can't go on the Google Webmaster Forums as I instantly get shot down for working in <my industry>.

Thank you for any help or advice you can offer.

[edited by: aakk9999 at 10:25 am (utc) on Oct 7, 2014]
[edit reason] Exemplified, sorry, no public site reviews and no niche disclosure for New Members [/edit]

[Ecopac]

Hi all

Ok so after 7 reconsiderations, today - finally - I had the email I have been waiting for.

Typically I was getting a response (rejection) within 2 days of a request, this time I was waiting for 10 days before getting a 'Penalty Revoked' message.

What a 7 weeks it's been, I got the penalty 3 days before I got married and 2 days before my grandmother passed away, you can imagine the stress levels were through the roof having my financial lifeline taken away as well.

I was just about to give up but there may be a light at the end of the tunnel. Now just to wait and see where it sits back in the SERPS given there's been a penguin refresh inbetween.

So, thank you to everyone that has helped me along the way, fingers crossed it goes back somewhere near where it finished.

Thanks again, I really appreciate the suggestions, support and help everyone gave

[JD_Toims]

What a 7 weeks it's been, I got the penalty 3 days before I got married and 2 days before my grandmother passed away, you can imagine the stress levels were through the roof having my financial lifeline taken away as well.

Wow, that would be an emotional roller-coaster. Sorry to hear about your loss of a loved one -- Congratulations on the wedding and getting the penalty situation worked out. Hope they're both great and workout well long-term.

[aakk9999]

@Ecopac,

would you mind sharing what changes to your site have you done (if any)?

Also, what was different with this reconsideration request you sent comparing to others you sent previously that it got approved?

[Ecopac]

Thanks JD much appreciated!

Sure I'd be glad to do a proper write up and say what I'd done through every request - I'll do that tomorrow!

Thanks again

---

Mods note:
Ecopac has created a new thread where it is described what was done to recover from manual penalty. The new thread can be found here:

Recovering from a Manual Penalty (Thin Content)
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4714369.htm [webmasterworld.com]

[edited by: aakk9999 at 6:53 pm (utc) on Nov 10, 2014]

[Ecopac]

"Hi guys

Well tomorrow it will be 1 week from getting the penalty removed and I wish I was coming back here with some good news.

It's honestly like it is still under penalty, literally no traffic at all. It's not ranking for ANY of the keywords it was before, even very low competition stuff, it's just nowhere. Nearest I can find is a couple of review pages on pages 7/8.

I don't know what's happening. After the penalty was removed, the .co.uk version of my site started showing up and ranking for a few terms - the .co.uk is redirected to the proper .com version and has never ranked before. After about 2 days they disappeared, but the proper .com version has vanished.

I don't know what to do, when I type in my brand name, I come up top, but the snippet is completely wrong - it's just pulling in text from a paragraph from within the homepage and not the meta description.

A site: search is showing 182 results which is fine, but nothing is ranking anywhere! Prior to the penalty I was very dominant, the site hasn't changed that much and it shouldn't be a link issue (Penguin) as there are hardly any links pointing to the site.

I have done a fetch, resubmitted the site map etc etc but nothing, any thoughts? Have I given it enough time do you think?

So frustrating!

Thanks "
.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 11:36 am (utc) on Nov 15, 2014]
[edit reason] restored accidental edit [/edit]

[philgames]

"Hi guys

Well tomorrow it will be 1 week from getting the penalty removed and I wish I was coming back here with some good news.

It's honestly like it is still under penalty, literally no traffic at all. It's not ranking for ANY of the keywords it was before, even very low competition stuff, it's just nowhere. Nearest I can find is a couple of review pages on pages 7/8.

I don't know what's happening. After the penalty was removed, the .co.uk version of my site started showing up and ranking for a few terms - the .co.uk is redirected to the proper .com version and has never ranked before. After about 2 days they disappeared, but the proper .com version has vanished.

I don't know what to do, when I type in my brand name, I come up top, but the snippet is completely wrong - it's just pulling in text from a paragraph from within the homepage and not the meta description.

A site: search is showing 182 results which is fine, but nothing is ranking anywhere! Prior to the penalty I was very dominant, the site hasn't changed that much and it shouldn't be a link issue (Penguin) as there are hardly any links pointing to the site.

I have done a fetch, resubmitted the site map etc etc but nothing, any thoughts? Have I given it enough time do you think?

So frustrating!

Thanks "

Usually it takes another refresh if you were affected by an algorithm too according to google swines but I think that is a lie because I you said you lost all your search keywords as soon as you got a manual penalty.. so in theory you should be where you started again...
.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 11:38 am (utc) on Nov 15, 2014]
[edit reason] added quote box [/edit]

[nettulf]

Remember you have changed the site a lot, I usually dont see any ranking differences before 3-4 weeks after big changes.

Don't expect to be back with the content that is not there anymore.

[Robert Charlton]

Mods note: Discussion continues on another thread. Locking this thread.

New discussion here....

Recovering from a Manual Penalty (Thin Content)
[webmasterworld.com...]