Still working on Google Penguin Recovery... what a chore!!

Too soon to tell. I just finished it all about an hour ago.

Nope - I still have all of the old pages uploaded; they redirect to the new pages so there's no 404 errors at all. And to avoid the duplicate content crap, the old pages are coded no index, no follow.

I double checked everything, one page at a time - about 170 pages, and everything's cool.

And actually, I've had just about ZERO traffic coming from Google since the update, so I'm not hurting anything. In fact, this will be a huge help moving ahead.

I'm really hoping it does help with getting my SE position back. I wasn't able to use "categories" and sub-directories though. My custom order form isn't set up for that. But if it was an over-optimization problem that killed the site, then de-optimizing it should do the trick.

First - thanks for the 301 info! I'm doing that RIGHT NOW! I didn't know what that was so I went on trusty ol' YouTube and I'm doing all of that fun stuff to 177 pages now.

Next, unfortunately, I think over-optimization is exactly what it was. For instance, I had 30 pages all named flower_design_xxx and another 32 pages named memorial_xxx, and so on. So it wasn't like having a page here and there having the keywords in the URL.

Also, e-commerce sites got hammered pretty good with this latest update. I have 177 pages that have "nothing" on them but an image, pricing, shipping and an order form. No other content. Everything on each page is exactly the same except for the image.

And with 177 pages of what Google sees as "duplicate content" plus have most of those pages end in "bookmarks" plus 30 pages here, 15 pages there, etc. all starting with same keyword as the category page, you can bet that "over optimization" is exactly what killed my site.

My site was on the first page of Google, above the fold, for many of its keywords. And I was getting a good deal of traffic. Until Penguin. I hadn't done anything with the site since the last Penguin update because I needed to analyze what it was that got my site knocked down.

And this is what it has to be, because everything else is okay. So for example, what I did when I built the site out was added a category page named memorial-bookmarks and then 32 pages - one order page each for the 32 designs, and they were all named memorial_xxx.

I did the same thing for the flower category, baby shower category, etc. Every order page in that category was named with the keyword. That is keyword stuffing, a/k/a "over optimization."

Plus more than half of those pages ended with _bookmarks, another obvious overuse or abuse or "over-optimization" of my primary keyword 'bookmarks.'

So yeah, ignorance isn't always bliss when you're building an e-commerce site for the first time. Live and learn.

So what I did was remove the "memorial" and replaced it with "mem" so the page is prefaced with more of a code than an actual keyword.

So yeah, I can see how Google thought I had "abused" the keywords throughout my site.

And no, if I put "noindex nofollow" Google knows not to index or follow those particular pages.

Also, on each separate order page, I also added the rel="canonical" referencing the respective category pages.

My site was doing great until I decided to add a separate order page for each bookmark design. And yes, there is a Google Over-Optimization penalty. I was just fortunate that my pages weren't de-indexed and I never received a penalty letter. But I would anticipate one if I didn't fix this.

6 Changes Every SEO Should Make BEFORE the Over-Optimization Penalty Hits - Whiteboard Friday | SEOmoz

Google Plans SEO Over-Optimization Penalty | Practical eCommerce

Your Website Might Be Over Optimized If

Okay, then why did so many e-commerce sites get hit? I've analyzed my backlinks. I never did any "spammy" automated backlinking. I've done the normal, everyday, natural backlinks... articles on solid, long-term blogs and other sites, social bookmarking, YouTube - but nothing automated or robot generated. No link pyramids or link wheels, nothing like that. "White Hat" all the way.

And if it was a thing of overusing the anchor text, what do I do - keep building new, fresh links with off the wall anchor text? The name of the store is The Bookmarks Store; it's what I sell.

I'm really confused now. I don't know what to do. Leave it alone? Take it down? Just say, oh well, so much for that business and shut the whole thing down? I mean, I can't even GIVE it away now because it's getting virtually ZERO traffic.

I mean, it can't "hurt," at least trying the page name changes and the 301s, right? :confused: :confused: :confused:

I'm just really ticked off because the sites that are now ranking higher than mine - which were on page 2 and beyond - are nowhere near as clean and well laid out as mine. Not trying to brag; I had tons of customers - before Penguin - that called me and said that after visiting the other sites, they always came back to mine because I had ...

1. better designs
2. easier to navigate
3. easier to order
4. better prices
5. more personalization
6. easy to contact
7. better customer service

But I guess none of that counts anymore because nobody's finding me being buried on pages 5+. It's really, really, really aggravating because I can't get any answers anywhere of what to do.

It's like, if it's not this and it's not that and it's not something else, then WTF is it?? What do I do?

In the meantime, since I have nothing else to do with the site, because I don't know WTF to do with it, AND because I've already set all of the pages up for meta-refresh, I'm going to go ahead and finish the 301 redirect - unless somebody comes up with something better.

Here's the history:
2009 I launched wedding-favor-bookmarks.com
2009 I launched memorial-bookmarks.com
For three years both sites were ranking on page #1 of Google for various keywords.

Around April 2012 I merged the two together under one domain, the-bookmarks-store.com

Within a month, the new site was ranking on page #1 of Google for a variety of keywords and stayed that way until around July or August.

Again, all "white hat" link building, mostly with content, videos, etc.

And then BAM. Right after last two Penguin updates, I was buried. No problems with the Panda update earlier this year, just after Penguin.

So for the last three months all I've been doing is videos and social bookmarking those and not doing anything at all to the site because I had no idea what to do.

This person says this, somebody else says that; Google says one thing, then says something else. And nobody can tell me what I should be doing - so I've been doing Nothing.

Until last night when I thought "maybe" it's the on-site keyword usage.

And now I hear that's not it.

I'm a firm believe of if it ain't broke, don't fix it. But "something" *broke* my site and I'm trying like hell to figure out what so I CAN fix it. So far obviously to no avail because it's still not coming up in rank. :confused:

As an aside: it's ranking extremely well in Yahoo and Bing but I don't get enough traffic from either of those to make up for the loss of Google traffic.

Oh, I feel for you!!! I JUST finished my overhaul!!! What I did was actually made two videos - one for a temporary index.html page and one for the 404 Error page.

I wanted to be able to actually TELL them that I was giving the site a good cleaning up and avoid people not coming back due to pages not being found. It makes it more personal I think.

And then I went about creating new directories, renaming some pages and literally re-reading every.single.article on my site, checking outbound links, etc. I may have missed a few, not sure. I'm going to run a tool to check for any broken links after both of my site maps are finished.

It's been a LONG day working on this but I'm not ready to give up on my site yet.

I did some reading about URL structure and I think that was one more thing that was really hanging me up. So now everything is cleaned up and very well organized.

And as for the crappy inbound links, I'll probably outsource the cleaning up of those - maybe. I haven't decided yet. I'm still a little leery about using the Disavow tool. And in the time it's going to take me to try and contact the website owners, which for most of them it'll be nearly impossible, I can use that time a lot more wisely by looking for other great linking opportunities to offset those.

It may take some time, but I believe it's worth it.