Could we have gotten penalized?

[jid]

Hey everyone,

We've recently seen a strange, unexplainable occurrence from one of our new websites.  We have been moving up in the rankings with the site since it was put online and some of the pages even jumped to #1 for their keyword category.

However the following week we lost all of those places.  Pages that were drowning in #1 were now just barely getting their feet wet in the 80s or 90s, and some pages in the 90s were lost completely from the charts.

Is there any way we may have gotten penalized for something on our site? Does Google penalize?  Or do they have bugs like this for some reason?

Any response would be helpful. Thank you very much!

Just for reference, the domain in question is www.dentistinsaltlakecity.com

[Marcus_Miller]

Additionally, if you do a search for chunks of random text from the site then various other sites are returned indicating either a non intentional dupe domain or some other nefarious duplication.

Both of these random search strings return more than one site:

"will enjoy a calming atmosphere amidst the big city hustle that surrounds us. Our goal is to make our patients relax"

"and even though dental school is incredibly arduous and intensive, there is still not agreement on what constitutes a cavity"

All in all, it looks like a network of fairly low quality sites built for the search engines with chunks of similar and duplicate content.

Great answer from Alan by the way, plenty to take heed of in there.

Marcus

[AlanBleiweiss]

This is a classic case of one of two things.  Either the Panda Update (or it's follow-on tweaks) hammered you, or your site just got wacked for not having the right stuff for ongoing trust.

Google will initially rank a site just on the core factors.  Then, over time, if other signals are not found, or if other signals are low quality (such as the mentioned anchor text all being too much alike), Google will adjust rankings accordingly.

This is why ongoing work is critical - adding fresh content regularly, obtaining new links with diversified anchor text, coming from a wide variety of sources, pointing to pages across the site, social signals - these are all important as reinforcement factors.

From a cursory look at your site I'm quite concerned about several things.

1.  Unique Content

You have almost no unique content - so little that I can't see why Google would rank you significantly for many phrases over the long haul.

http://www.dentistinsaltlakecity.com/index.php?base=xcp_FeaturedServices is one example - there's nothing on this page that supports justifying this page's being ranked, especially for any important phrase.  Not only is there essentially zero content, only one of the services listed is a link, without any related content wrapping around it.

That in turn offers no ability for that page to drive any ranking weight to the Teeth Whitening page that is linked in the content area. It's a similar situation on other pages, such as your staff page http://www.dentistinsaltlakecity.com/index.php?base=xcp_OurStaff.  Compared to the top, sidebar and footer that are essentially duplicate across all pages, those three sentences are all of a sudden very weak when looking at the "is this page mostly unique content" perspective.

2. Topical Dilution

Then, on the Teeth Whitening page http://www.dentistinsaltlakecity.com/index.php?base=xcp_TeethWhitening

You've got "Dentist in Salt Lake City" wrapped in an h1 tag, and "Salt Lake City Teeth Whitening" wrapped in an h3 tag.  While HTML header tags are not ultimately critical for SEO when all other aspects are well optimized, in this situation, it's not helping and probably adding to the hurt.  This is because the h1 tag signals "this is the most important topic on this page", and the h3 not only says "this isn't most important, it's not even really important, since it's not even an h2".

The same problem exists with the Implant page.  And in both cases, having the "Dentist in Salt Lake City" wrapped in an h1 is a conflict with your page titles unique to those pages.

And having "Teeth Whitening Dentist in Salt Lake City" in the footer of pages that should have a different focus doesn't help either.  It dilutes those topics. ESPECIALLY because it's wrapped in an h1 tag, fighting against each page's own primary h1 tag in the main content area (the only place an h1 should be found).

3. Local SEO

From a local SEO perspective, your business address is nowhere to be found.  It should be on the sidebar, or in the bottom of the main content area of each page (not even in the footer), in HTML readable text.  Without an address, you're lacking that extra validation that you really are a Salt Lake City service, which just adds to the already weak topical focus depth I've already described.

4.  Broken Pages

Then there's this problem: http://www.dentistinsaltlakecity.com/index.php?base=Home and http://www.dentistinsaltlakecity.com/index.php?base=xcp_Cash - you've got a handful of entries in Google's index like that.  Those have to be fixed, and those URL's either need to be redirected to other pages or have unique content on them.

5.  Duplicate Content

You also have a duplicate content problem because both http://www.dentistinsaltlakecity.com and http://dentistinsaltlakecity.com work.  Pick one or the other, then have the other version set up to automatically redirect to the one you chose - across the whole site.  (These are called "301 redirects" - it's a server instruction).

Duplicate content also exists in that http://www.dentistinsaltlakecity.com/index.php?base=home also goes to the home page, which should only be found by either http://www.dentistinsaltlakecity.com/ or http://dentistinsaltlakecity.com/ So change the links on your own site pointing to the home page (including the logo wrapped link).

6.  Inbound Link Profile

As for inbound links, a quick check on OpenSiteExplorer.org showed you've got just over 350 but they're coming from only four domains.  That's an extremely high link to root domain ratio.  The higher that ratio, the weaker the overall inbound link profile.So you have a LOT of work ahead to build up many more links from a much larger variety of root domain sources.  That alone will have a huge impact in your situation over time.

Note:

My very cursory review didn't see any duplicate content issues across your various web sites (like from http://www.dentistinprovoutah.com, http://www.dentistonuppereastside.com, and http://www.dentistincherrycreek.com ) so that's a positive. (I assume those are your sites) But it begs the question - how many sites do you have? And is there any cross-site duplication of content?  That's something to be sure isn't going on.

[BlinkWeb]

I do not believe you have been penalized. You still come up on the first page for Dentist in Salt Lake City".

Especially on new sites, it has been my experience that it's not uncommon to see an initial boost in rankings for new sites before sinking to your natural position.

[Dan-Petrovic]

Check to see if your website has been compromised. Log into Google Webmaster Tools and check your keywords. If you start seeing: serial numbers, casino, xxx, viagra...etc then you may have a problem. We were hacked a year ago and lost our rankings in a similar way until we discovered what happened. Another way to check is Google's Malware check tool.

Note: When manually checking for site hacks going to source code of your site is not good enough. Check source of your cache too.

[SteveOllington]

It depends when it was too... the Panda/Farmer update affected plenty of websites like that. It looks like ALL of your anchor text is the same which probably wouldn't help matters.

[SteveOllington]

It depends when it was too... the Panda/Farmer update affected plenty of websites like that. It looks like ALL of your anchor text is the same which probably wouldn't help matters.

[Sangeeta]

For future get your site verified by adding a verification code via Google webmaster. This helps identify the site problems if any.

I did a search for 'salt lake city dentist' you are #1on Google maps!?

[MarloSchneider]

In addition to danzspas advice, Rankings can shoot up if you have a lot of social mentions.  Was there a spike in your social mentions? twitter links, facebook shares etc?  These can give huge short term boosts.

[danzspas]

Take a look at this:

http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/myths-and-misconceptions-about-search-engines

Its a part of the seomoz beginners guide. Theres a great flow chart in there helping you to understand if you've been blocked.

You're showing up for your own domain name so you certainly haven't been blocked completely.