First of all, I am absolutely 100% certain I am dealing with a penalty. A search for my domain (in the style of ‘keyword-info.tld’), with the tld omitted will put me somewhere at page 6. Other tlds with the same domain (not owned and/or operated by me) do show up on page 1 as they should, but their tlds don’t match the country I’m targeting. So a penalty it is. Here’s a list of things I tried:

• Fixed trailing slash duplicate content issue through a 301.
• Fixed ‘index.php’ duplicate content issue through a 301.
• Fixed ‘www’ subdomain canonical duplicate content issue through a 301.
• Removed all defective and/or thematically irrelevant links.
• Added a privacy policy.
• Added a creativecommons licensing statement.
• Checked robots.txt -> nothing wrong.
• Checked safebrowsing tool -> nothing wrong.
• Checked meta tags -> nothing wrong.
• Added noindex,follow to news index and category pages.
• Added rel=”nofollow” to a button of a thematically relevant high-quality top 50 listing – I NEVER purchased or sold a SINGLE link.
• Added ‘nofollow’ to my free thematic business listing, just in case G might be thinking I’m selling these positions.
• Built a couple of nice high-quality links through guest posting.
• Added new quality content on a regular basis.
• Added a tag cloud to improve crawlability.
• Added a great deal of relevant Wikipedia-like internal linking (as per Ronburk’s classic post).
• Added noindex,follow on the individual tag-pages to prevent duplicate content.
• Added the new canonical tag (yes, I am desperate).
• Removed interlinking (it was only minor anyways).

So, did I miss anything? I have to say that several external sites display one or more of my content pages. However, these pages all contain backlinks to my site, signaling to Google that my site is the original content provider. Note that we are talking about maybe 3 of 4 sites that each display a single page of my content. Should I ask these webmasters to take down my content or replace it with an excerpt? I’m not really sure whether this is the culprit, since I have another site which has been penalized in the same way at the same time. This site however does not have any copies of its content floating around and is thematically completely unrelated to the first site.

As you can see, I’m running out of options. As it stands now, my site is insanely clean. On-site duplicate content is virtually non-existant and all other technical issues are ironed out (gzip compression is on etc.).

Any ideas?

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One Response to “Strategy For Solving Penalty Issues”

1. Ryan says:

   May 21, 2009 at 11:51 am

   I’ve generally come across the “page 6″ penalty when dealing with clients who have been renting links. I’d take a quick look at your backlinks and see if anything might look fishy to a googler. Good luck!