Problem with Google - Please read!

Hello,

First let me start off with saying that I have been an avid reader of seochat with regards to seo "friendly" practices. My website, beyond-bedding (dotcom), has been in business for over 4 years. We have always listed naturally very well.

As far as SEO (aside from website SEO ((internal linking structure, content, meta tags, etc.)) we were purchasing content relevant links through websites. Most of the links were blog sites with links through every page or on the right side/bottom bar.

We also recently changed our title pages to include more keywords.

We dropped about 5-10 pages for all of our major keywords. We no longer list for our own domain, beyond-bedding (dotcom) (the forum won't let me post our link). I have dropped all links and am focusing on content relevant links within paragraph text. I'm not sure if there is anything else I should be looking at. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Mike
Beyond-Bedding

It may have to do with a sudden change in titles, especially if the links to those pages make up a large percentage of the whole content, not 100% sure, but from experience, once you change meta titles by adding, changing even slight change, that leads to Google (particularly) putting those links in what is called the sand box for a while. If the links constituted a large %age of the site, the whole site get sandboxed. Some reported only couple of weeks to a month, but some reported up to three months, in my experience is certainly 4-6 weeks on average, but once took 6 months.

The reason apparently is they are treated with suspicion or treated as new links, due to the fact that whoever is linking to them is using the old keywords in anchor text, and seen the links do not have the keywords at worst anymore or the keywords are different, the links will be seen as new (nobody yet is linking to them with the new keywords) hence need to gain what's called the "trustrank" and link popularity from the anchor text perspective. Depending on how much authority the site has, its inbound links (natural or artificial), site's age and other factors only Google would know about, the site will bounce back if compliant with the Google content guidelines.

Make sure your site does not have any hidden text or links (someone hasen't planted them), and check who you are linking to (linking to bad sites is bad news), check for duplicate content and duplicate URLs, that is different links leading to the same page (that can happen accidentally and Google ignored it before, but now sees it as duplicate) .

We changed our titles about two months ago. They are keyword specific to the content in the paragraphs. Does google penalize on titles that are too "SEO'ed" ? We were also told that our site wide links and bottom page links were penalizing us. I am just trying to figure out why we were penalized so i can fix it...

There are certainly many reports of SEO "overoptimisation" and many sites got penalised or at least had to wait and re-build trustrank. I can not answer for your specific site as to what Google think of it, one can only go by their content guidelines which is clue enough to make sure they are met. We all try our best to do our SEO as clean as we can, but mistakes happen.

For example, if you change the titles in news articles, product pages or forum threads and you happen to have an xml feed to one or all of them AND in there you have the titles unchanged or different, Google will index both the titles from feeds and titles from the html pages, then DEH how come two titles for the same page or how come two URLs (if URLs are different) are different, hence duplicate content...

I'd ease a bit on artificial linking, after all if most of your inbound links are not organic / natural or most are from your own sites or from sites in the same class C IP or even worse a shared IP sites, is said to lead to penalties for either duplicate content or un-natural means of inflating site's worth and popularity.

I am not a consultant on SEO to any other site, I only look after the sites on our servers and do all the SEO for them, I'd if I were you have a word with someone with SEO authority here, you may have more problems than you think OR no problems at all. Two months is not too late, if you added a sitemap to Google, that may speed up the process of collecting the links with the new titles by the spiders.

Many people in the SEO industry discourage changing titles for well established pages for reasons I highlighted above in the previous answer. It's a dilemma I know, you may be tempted to change them back again and the cycle of trust building will start all over again, if it was only a couple of days since the change, is mostly safe I hear and rank will usually bounce back few days later.

Google engineers are known to manually review sites which show a sudden unexpected climb in traffic or the addition of zillions of pages all at once, many will be found harmless natural product pages for examples, but some sites might have had an injection of automated comment spam links and get penalised, though for well known authority sites I heard Google actually warned them by mail. Check your Google webmaster tools account to see if there are any problems of duplicate content or non-indexable links etc, usually that gives a clue.

Thank you very much for your advice. Would you recommend changing my titles back? It's been about 3 weeks now. As far as my other links that I have cancelled - should i continue with starting my linking structure over again? Should I try to reinstate my links?

If changing your title was all you did then change them back and do come nofollow link sculpting internally.

You probably affected the theme strength by diluting the page with additional keywords, related or not.

You are better off adding kw derivatives within the content and on other pages linking back to the page that target the primary keyword. Otherwise build additional pages targeting the secondary kw's and link to them from the page targeting the primary kw.

GaryTheScubaGuy