Site not banned but for months no longer in first 1000 SERPīs

[freshfun]

Dear All,

First of all, I HAVE gone through numerous forums including this one and did find good posts (like the sticky one from Visio in this forum) and in the past months have been applying numerous suggestions as you can read in this post, but have not been able to find the answer hence the reason starting a new thread .

My site I not banned but for months now itīs no longer showing for any of the Keywords in the first 1000 SERPīs. Allow me to “shortly” explain:
• I launched my multilingual Magento site (freshfunfashion<dot>com) (EN/FR/ES) at the end of March 2012 (NO auto-translation!)
• About 2 weeks after launch I could already find some of the keywords within the first fifty-some results of google(.es/.fr)
• Steadily building links (mainly through directories.. yes I know, maybe not the best) and the keywords started rising towards the first 20 search results in Google
• Continued on-page optimization such as creating user friendly URLīs, adding ALT texts to images and removing duplicate content from product descriptions and creating unique content

NOTE1): after reading Visioīs post (link above) the thing that attracted my attention was “4-Site Structure Disruption”. At one point, when creating the User friendly URLs I DID remove the OLD URLīs instead of using 301 redirects (only found out about this later). Could this be the reason of all the problems?
NOTE2) Should I have even more content on the pages? Could this be a reason for not ranking within the first 1000 results?

• Created and submitted 3 Sitemap.xmlīs (for the three languages EN/ES/FR) in Google WM tools and created a robots.txt


Then, it must have been at the end of June 2012, when from one day to the other the keyword searches stopped showing up (at least within the first 1000 search results)! And I mean, for ALL keyword searches!

• I checked site:freshfunfashion<dot>com and the results are there so guess Iīm not banned..
• I went up & down Googleīs webmaster tools, corrected crawl errors, duplicate contents and tags and other errors.. all seems pretty ok now
• Keep writing blog posts (blog.freshfunfashion.com) once a month and creating directory entries
• I thought about the “Google Sandbox effect” but after waiting for months now without a position change something else must be the matter
• I thought about the Google Pinguin update at the end of April but I was then live only some 4 weeks and also after the update my ranking kept steadily growing until completely disappearing in June 2012.. is it still possible I got hit by Pinguin?

So.. I thought I had a quality site and I should at least be within the first 100 or so results for example for “T-shirt Homme” or “Pantacourt Homme” on Google.fr or “Camisestas Originales” or “Pantalones Cortos” on Google.es (just looking at all the low quality sites that come after the first 100 search results or so).

Thanks all,
Floris // Barcelona, Spain

[Darrin Ward]

I am curious about the link building part - you glazed over that. Were you developing any bad links or spamming - be honest!?

[freshfun]

Hi Darrin -- so according to GWT I have about 20 incoming links from directories. And to be honest (really honest ) creating these links with small descriptions at different directories was the only work I had someone else do (one-person SEO consultant.. who I personally know and though could trust). For real!

So.. would there be any way to check if any of these links could cause the tremendous demise in ranking described?

[subzero27]

20 directory links would do no good. You high quality links frome relevant sites to even think of ranking.

your site belongs to a very competitive industry so ideally you would need hundreds of high quality links to even rank within the top 20.

Your site age isn't too much either 2011-11-12.

get good links and create content and keep doing that again and again. You will see results.

[DarrenHaye]

Were you actually getting any traffic from search engines or selling anything from those visitors?

You have barely any links to your site, those links you do have are very poor quality.

I would imagine any keywords you were ranking for have extremely low searches a month and even if you were #1 for them you would get near to no traffic.

Your sites look and usability isn't very good, I click on a picture of a tshirt it doesn't even take me to the product page, it was quite frustrating.

I would have the site redone..

And then if I were you id give away as many items to popular fashion bloggers as possible.

[freshfun]

Hi subzero-- thanks for taking the time to answer!

Regarding the links, yes, that is what I will definitely focus on. However, I still find it very, very strange that even within the top 1000 thereīs no ranking for either of the keywords! I mean, after the first 100-some hits there really isnīt any quality anymore and I paid a lot of attention to have a quality site. This is what really surprises me.. I do understand that to make it WITHIN the top 100 hits itīs having the highly qualitative links but with all the optimization Iīve already done I would expect to be within the top 1000. Thanks again.

[freshfun]

Were you actually getting any traffic from search engines or selling anything from those visitors?

You have barely any links to your site, those links you do have are very poor quality.

I would imagine any keywords you were ranking for have extremely low searches a month and even if you were #1 for them you would get near to no traffic.

Your sites look and usability isn't very good, I click on a picture of a tshirt it doesn't even take me to the product page, it was quite frustrating.

I would have the site redone..

And then if I were you id give away as many items to popular fashion bloggers as possible.

Thanks for your answer Darren. Objective and very valuable for me. I still struggle to see how I can be so "far out of the league" of SERP though.. even when the design is not what you would like it to be. Totally agree on the links and developing a better marketing strategy . Cheers!