Help! Cannot Lift Google Filter After Trying Everything

4 replies
My site's URL (web address) is: bit.ly/jBaH4j
Description (including timeline of any changes made):

I have a website that determines the best products by aggregating user reviews from product ratings taken from several other sites and combining them to get an overall percentage. It then lists the products by category according to highest rated. This is a site I want to continue to develop and I actually want to make it as useful as possible.

First a brief history:

March 2011:
I started the site in March 2011 and at first it was basically product lists in order of highest rated products along with affiliate links to where you can buy them. I did some linkbuilding and within two weeks, I was ranking on the first page for phrases such as "best protein powder" and got about 100 unique visits per day. Two weeks later I got hit with what I think was either a thin affiliate or possibly a duplicate content penalty (my site had no unique content). My rankings went from first page to between positions 400 - 1000 for all my keywords. My brand name "All User Reviews" ranked 200 - 300.

June 2011:
I decided to add content to the category pages by scraping text reviews and product descriptions from Amazon and collecting video reviews from Youtube and displaying them on my site in a useful way. I now know this scraping was a terrible idea.

July 2011:
My whole site bounced back July 5th and 6th, for all pages. On the 7th, it went right back down. I decided to take out the scraped content. After taking out all of the scraped content, I added unique content to end of each category page and unique product descriptions for each of the top 10 products that are shown by default. I also added functions that allow you to see more products.

September 2011:
Fixed multiple H1 tags issue which I thought could be causing a problem. Google just recrawled my site. No luck.

Throughout this time, I have built a variety of links using article marketing, blog network sites, some lower quality profile links, some forums, etc. Google Reconsideration Request has told me that it is not a manual penalty. It's an algorithmic filter. Matt Cutts says if you change what's wrong with your site with an algorithmic filter, it will fix after a recrawl. I've waited two months for Panda to recrawl it after adding the original content and I still rank past position #600 for all my targeted keywords. My brand name "All User Review" has jumped from page 1 to page 18 repeatedly. Only weird thing is that I rank #4 for "best gainer supplement 2011". No clue why as all others rank past page 60. Filter is definitely sitewide and not page specific.

The only thing I think it might be is an anchor text over optimization filter for having too many exact anchor text links. Not sure how to fix this or if it would worth trying at this point.

Should I just start over on a new domain? If I do, should I not use a 301 redirect considering it's redirecting from a penalized page?

Thanks in advance for all your help!
#filter #google #lift #penalty
  • Profile picture of the author kindsvater
    My understanding is if you were hit by the Panda algorithm it is not a question of when Google next crawls your site, it is a question of when the next Panda adjustment is made.

    That is, the Panda filter is not automatically re-evaluated with each crawl, but only redone when someone at Google hits the filter button. This has apparently been happening about every 6-8 weeks.

    Your site could also be too new, and have too many radical changes, to expect Google to know what to do with it for rankings. So far you've apparently had thin affiliate problems, duplicate content, scraped content, etc. Would you suddenly give it a good ranking just because, today, you tried something different?

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  • Profile picture of the author amptony
    Thanks for the insight Kindsvater.

    I feel like it's been about 8 weeks since I've added only unique content, but I guess I'll wait a little longer.

    I didn't realize Google takes into account the content history of a site.
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  • Profile picture of the author GeorgR.
    I am in the same boat with ONE site gotten hit significantly on April, 1st and STILL down in the SERPs. I think its not as drastic as yours, but something happened around April-ish which seriously affected the site.

    I suspect it might have to do with anchor text variety, its a quality site, hand written articles, great little site. I am just stumped and cant do more than "wait"...although i am waiting since April now for the site to recover.

    Otherwise, fluctations are really rather common..but i havent seen a site down in the SERPs for so long.
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    • Profile picture of the author amptony
      Originally Posted by GeorgR. View Post

      I am in the same boat with ONE site gotten hit significantly on April, 1st and STILL down in the SERPs. I think its not as drastic as yours, but something happened around April-ish which seriously affected the site.

      I suspect it might have to do with anchor text variety, its a quality site, hand written articles, great little site. I am just stumped and cant do more than "wait"...although i am waiting since April now for the site to recover.

      Otherwise, fluctations are really rather common..but i havent seen a site down in the SERPs for so long.
      Strange that you say your site got hit April 1st cause that the same exact day my site got slammed.

      I think it's very possible mine has to do with anchor text variety as well. I've got so many bad quality exact anchor text links that I think it would be really hard to fix. It's also tough investing money into something you think might work and then waiting endlessly to find out it didn't.
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