Is Google sandboxing / penalizing my domain?

3 replies
  • SEO
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First time poster, hoping someone here can help. My URL is: Learn Conversational Spanish in 30 days

Problem: It seems like Google is penalizing my site, but I am stumped as to why. The site shows up fine if you do a site search for "onemonthspanish.com" but it is not ranking in Google for any sort of keyword-based search. My site ranks #2 in Bing and #1 in DuckDuckGo for the phrase "One Month Spanish" but in Google, the site doesnt show up anywhere in the first few pages of the serps.

Site Details:
  • Domain is nearly a year old (new registration)
  • I have had the current homepage for the last 8 or so months. I started adding real long-form content and a few manual backlinks about 2 months ago.
  • The site currently has 30+ pages of "lesson" content that looks like this: One Month Spanish - Lesson 5: First day at work. The site has also 100+ short vocabulary pages like this: Teacher in Spanish | Spanish for teacher (and more People). There is also a blog, but only one article written so far.
  • Google Webmaster Tools had indexed > 150 pages of the site.
  • My Moz Domain Authority is 8, The Page Authority of the homepage is 20.
  • Google Webmaster Tools recognizes 19 external links pointing to my site.
  • The handful of links pointing to my site are all white hat, manually created links (a dozen or so blog comments, some links from my personal wordpress/tumblr blogs). Probably half of these do use the anchor "One Month Spanish" (which I assumed was the right way to do "branded" anchor text.)
  • There are no manual actions or errors shown in Webmaster Tools

Is it possible that I have been hit with some sort of over optimization penalty?

My title tag is "One Month Spanish | Learn and Improve Conversational Spanish". My H1 is "One Month Spanish." According to SEOQuake, the phrase "one month spanish" is used on my landing page 5 times and has a keyword density of 1%. The word "Onemonthspanish" (all one word, no spaces) is used 13 times, with a keyword density of 0.87%. The word "spanish" is used 56 times with a keyword density 3.74%.

This does not seem like a lot, but maybe the combination of the title tag, h1, keyword density and anchor text all using "One Month Spanish" is causing it to get to get punished by Google? "One Month Spanish" is not a keyphrase that I actually targeting per se -- the only reason I am using it so frequently is simply because it the name of the brand/product. The terms I really want to rank for are things like "learn spanish", "conversational spanish", "learn spanish fast", etc but I am not currently ranking for anything in Google.

I'd be extremely grateful for any thoughts or ideas!
#domain #google #penalizing #penguin #sandboxing
  • Profile picture of the author Icematikx
    Without sounding offensive towards you, your backlink profile sounds awfully weak. You mentioned yourself, you only have a "handful" of links. Google primarily uses links to determine where you should rank. DuckDuckGo and other search engines use different algorithms - but forget about them for now as their market share is too low to even worry about optimizing your site for them.

    With Google, it's all about BACKLINKS, and the AUTHORITY and STRENGTH of those backlinks. Useless, junk blog comments and tumblr blogs are JUNK. Your competitors have links from PR4+ private blog networks in bulk. Google will not rank you because your website is better than the competition. You may have more pages, more resources, a better writing ability.. whatever.. That isn't how Google works.

    Google works purely on backlinks. As a small business owner, you will need to invest in grey hat / black hat methods such as building a private blog network. You most likely don't have the funds, time nor knowledge to go against the big boys purely white hat. That's why PBN's are so popular.
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    Just got back from a #BrightonSEO. I was given room 404 in the hotel I stayed at. Couldn’t find it anywhere!

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  • Profile picture of the author SEO Power
    It's not an over-optimisation penalty. It's just that Google doesn't think your site is good enough to rank well for any terms (happens a lot with new domains). Possible reasons why are the following:

    1. Your site is not old enough.
    2. You site doesn't have enough powerful backlinks.
    3. Your domain has a penalty attached to it (if it has been dropped).

    There are other reasons of course but start with these three.
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    • Profile picture of the author trustdnb
      No offense taken. My backlink profile is still pretty weak, no doubt. If that is all it is, then I'm okay with that.

      Seeing myself in the top 2 results on Bing/DDG threw me off, but i think the difference may be in how those search engines treat exact match domains.

      Thanks for the replies.
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