http://arizonamortgagegroup.com

Hi,

I'm a loan officer in Arizona, and I've put a basic HTML site together in the last few months to try and develop an Internet lead source for my mortgage business. This is my first attempt at website building and seo, so I've learned a lot but still have a long ways to go.

Ideally, the site would rank for the following main keywords: arizona mortgage, carefree mortgage, cave creek mortgage, chandler mortgage, glendale mortgage, mesa mortgage, paradise valley mortgage, peoria mortgage, phoenix mortgage, scottsdale mortgage and tempe mortgage.

I tried to optimize the home page for arizona mortgage, and I made a page for each of the other main keywords in the Local Info section, though they're just basic data at this point because I'm not sure what the site's status is and if the pages are worth completing.

Here's my problem: the site is nowhere in the serps on either yahoo or google. For about two weeks towards the end of May it ranked well for several of my keywords, but then it disappeared entirely from the serps and has been gone ever since. FYI, the site went online at the beginning of May, and I purchased some links from a generic directory that pointed to it for about 6 weeks or so between June and July.

From what I can tell, the site is pretty much fully indexed by both google and yahoo, but it still doesn't show up. It still gets hit by their spiders several times a week, too.

I don't really know what's going on or what to do at this point. Any suggestions to get back into the rankings on yahoo and google would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

Looks like some sort of punishment to me. Have you tried to decieve the search engines in any way? (Hidden text, link farms... etc?)

First of all, thanks for the response.

To answer your question, I never used hard-core spammy techniques on the site (cloaking, link farms, etc.) However, I did have the following on the site: titles with multiple uses of the page's main keyword, line of text at the top of the page repeating the keyword several times, "Keywords" section on the left side of the page under the menu bar repeating the keyword several times.

I also had near-duplicate pages on the site in the loan programs section, and I made the arizona mortgage link in the copyright text of each page match the text around it so you couldn't tell it was a link. I think most of these are visible if you look at yahoo or google's cache pages for the site.

I have now removed all the spammy text from the site, though it's only been a few days since it was all removed.

Assuming I was penalized, can I get back into the search engines in the near future?

If not, could I shut down the existing domain name and move my content to a new domain? Or would google and yahoo remember the content from the previous site and penalize/ban me for duplicate content?

Well... AFAIK, Google doesn't penalize pages that repeats a keyword several times. I used it once and everthing was Ok. Google certainly found something else it didn't like.

Google looks to be a little sensitive when dealing with mortgage sites. Not sure why!

Honestly, i am not very familiar with Google penalties (Never happened to me before). I hope someone else reading this can shed more light on the subject. How long should one wait before it goes away? Best strategy?... etc.

link with www then you actually get a PR


Dan