Originally Posted by stephench
The homepage does still come up for other keywords. But I am still concerned whether this is due to some kind of penalty since the homepage has much much more external links from relevant websites.
I did have some SEO people build some amount of external links coming back to my website recently. The links they build are all from those irrelevant directories and classifieds websites. I am not sure it has any use at all. If somehow these links are creating damage, I would like to stop using them immediately.
Please kindly advise.
It is drop not a penalty. <- period
Originally Posted by stephench
We have much more than 2 pages on the websites. It's not a thin-content website. We reached 1st page for a short duration before. We do have another website with similar content. The content in the two websites are about 75% similar since the products are two software with very similar features. Maybe google decided to drop one of them out of the ranks due to duplicate content.
As you said you have 2 similar websites with 75% matching content one website might be filtered by Google. What Google advise is if you are dealer and manage online store, you should keep your product description unique than your manufacturers.