Google Slap - Anything to do with geo location?

[englishchrissy]

Hi, this is my 1st post so please go easy on me. Our site which sells ebooks was steadily growing and doing nicely until 12 Aug 2009, then it got slapped by Google. We had not added any new links for a few months or made any site changes apart from adding new books. We use Advanced Web Ranking and can see all our deep links have disappeared from google.com and most of the main page links. Google UK and Google UK UK have gone down a bit but nowhere near Google.com. We are a UK based site but obviously our books get downloaded all over the World but mainly US, UK, Canada and Australia. The English speaking countries. Yahoo and Bing have not been affected at all.

Would it help to move our site to a US server as the US is about 66% of the business?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for your time.

[warrior123]

How old is your site?

Were these deep links coming from spammy type websites?

[bigcat1967]

You said you stopped adding links - maybe you should return to that.

[englishchrissy]

The site is 3 years old and it is an adult site that had been steadily growing. The links come from book authors as well as other adult sites. I don't think any are spammy sites and we don't do any black hat shyte.

We have started again trying to get more links but what I meant by that in the original post was that all our link partners had been in place for at least 2 months before getting slapped so I don't think we got a bad link partner causing it.

[debra]

Originally Posted by englishchrissy

The site is 3 years old and it is an adult site that had been steadily growing. The links come from book authors as well as other adult sites. I don't think any are spammy sites and we don't do any black hat shyte.

We have started again trying to get more links but what I meant by that in the original post was that all our link partners had been in place for at least 2 months before getting slapped so I don't think we got a bad link partner causing it.

You don't need to "move" your server to a US based server. I doubt very much that it is a problem with the linking you did. And...contrary to everyones belief...you don't have to consistantly build links. You do just so many for the search engines benefit and the rest should be focused on bringing in the traffic (human eyeballs).

You may very well have an issue with the geo targeting. It would depend on your onpage seo.

Are you on html static pages or a wp platform?

If your on a wp platform...do you have the plugins that will let you change your header tags on certain pages that you want targeted to the US area?

I have a three line code snippet that you add to your tags in the header that should fix your geo targeting problem.

[englishchrissy]

The site uses dynamic pages built using php and mysql. There over 2500 pages. We use Advanced Web Ranking and can see that virtually all our pages have been de-indexed on google.com. There has been a small reduction in google.co.uk as well.

All html page titles are different and so are the html descriptions and keywords. We haven't done anything naughty and that is why it is so hard to understand.

Our US traffic has been turned off basically overnight. That is why we were thinking it a geo location thing. We are hosted in UK.

[kkchoon]

I think Google show local result based on 2 major factors:

1. Your server IP address
2. The website IP who link to you

If you had many links from UK, your webpage for that keyword will probably show high in UK search, but not going to do well in the rest of the world...

You just need more links, high PR links will do

If you think your site is filtered, a.k.a sandbox - Read more information here.

[debra]

Originally Posted by englishchrissy

The site uses dynamic pages built using php and mysql. There over 2500 pages. We use Advanced Web Ranking and can see that virtually all our pages have been de-indexed on google.com. There has been a small reduction in google.co.uk as well.

All html page titles are different and so are the html descriptions and keywords. We haven't done anything naughty and that is why it is so hard to understand.

Our US traffic has been turned off basically overnight. That is why we were thinking it a geo location thing. We are hosted in UK.

Sent you a pm.