Why have Google Penalised Me?

[4little1s]

That doesnt sound good, we have 500 odd pages and you say Google only see 20 of them....is this because we have been penalised then ?

 

[david64]

No, you have 535 pages indexed by Google:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site:4little1s.com

but Peter pointed out that Google only really sees 20 of them as being worth taking seriously:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site:4little1s.com/*

This is probably because of the content is being viewed as spam(my). In particular your blog, http://4little1s.4little1s.com/, this will be doing you no favours.

 

[david64]

As mentioned previously. I think you need to hire someone in to help you with the site. There are a lot of problems:

There is masses of duplicate content: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q="C...+appliques"+site:4little1s.com&hl=en&filter=0
The title tags are full of too many keywords - they are not human readable
Some titles contain irrelevant words
The HTML is full of errors and contains non-HTML elements
Site doesn't use canonical URLs
Reciprocal linking is the base of the link building
Site isn't cross-browser compatible
Your blog would be viewed as spam
No text on a lot of pages meaning Google won't take much notice of them
You are duplicating a lot of content on your blog
Large blank spaces
Returning text content without defining a character set
Using underscores in URLs instead of hyphens

To name the ones I can see.

The problems lie in 3 places:

* eCommerce system (Actinic) is not SEO-friendly
* Site is being over-optimised for search engines at the expense of usability and readability
* Relying largely on reciprocal linking

 

[SFD]

No, you have 535 pages indexed by Google:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site:4little1s.com

but Peter pointed out that Google only really sees 20 of them as being worth taking seriously:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site:4little1s.com/*

This is probably because of the content is being viewed as spam(my). In particular your blog, http://4little1s.4little1s.com/, this will be doing you no favours.

Please can you explain the differences between those 2 results, I've never seen that before.

 

[david64]

@SFD - The first one tells you how many pages Google has indexed for a domain. The second tells you how many are indexed and not considered supplemental, see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supplemental_Result

4Little1s has a supplemental ratio of 535:20 or 1 in 27, which is bad. You should really be looking at having at least half your pages not in the supplemental index.

 

[SFD]

Cheers for that David, very useful to know.

 

[4little1s]

Yes thanks everyone, plenty to work on then....think I will start my deleting my blog then....here goes.

 

[peterjhale]

Just a quick look over your home page, and you have not 1, not 2 but THREE H1 tags in there. I mean that is just kinda spammy these days.

@4little1s - you may want to read these last couple of pages again. People have provided you excellent advice you need to act on - additionally the item I've quoted above might have been lost in my post for you - have 3 H1's on a page will do you no favours at all

 

[peterjhale]

Yes thanks everyone, plenty to work on then....think I will start my deleting my blog then....here goes.

It would be a shame to delete the blog after you have put so much work into it and I would save it.

But only if the text is yours (ie: not simply taken from a sales brochure)

If it is your text and NOT from your sales site here's what I would do.

1) rename 4little1s.4littles.com to blog.4little1s.com
2) put a decent <title> on it - like baby bedding and accessories blog (or whatever you are targeting)
3) remove all links to your site from the posts
4) add in one link per post in the middle of each post to a page inside your site (ie: not home page)


For all the stuff you have to do, do it one piece at a time and wait a week to see what happens rather than making sweeping changes and not knowing what has worked or not

Good luck and let us know how you get on.

 

[fisicx]

Agree with Peter, changing the site needs to be planned process. If you just jump in a make site wide changes you won't know if things have worked or not.

You need to identify global changes that affect the whole site and specific changes that only apply to invividual changes. You need to then prioritise thes course of action so that nothing gets missed and the important things get done first.

Another thing that you need to consider is your page content. The bottom of each page seems almost spammy as the content is duplicated again and again on the site. And that long list of links in the footer offers no value to the visitor (it's almost unreadable) and the SE will think the same way as well.

Remember the prime google rule: build sites for people not the search engines.

 

[4little1s]

Thank you everyone

 

[david64]

I just found this:

http://kooringa.co.uk/

That site has been penalised (sandboxed) the same as your business site.

I'd imagine that you've either been reported by a competitor or found by someone at Google's web spam department. It's very rare that you will get penalised - you have to push hard.

To get back, you are going to have to take all the advice given here, get rid of this: kooringa.co.uk (and any other link farms you have), get rid of your reciprocal links page and be very honest in your re-inclusion request. Tell them you know you have where you have gone, the issues have been rectified and it won't happen again.

If you've had an SEO advising you to do these things get rid of them as they have brought you the penalty.

 

[andychukse]

I agree but in this case it's the complete lack of unique content that's worrying - there is no reason why Google should give this site a prominent position. But of course if the site does get back where it was next week then it means I was talking bollox.

Quite Agree with you