Q and A: Has my site been penalized?

Dear Kalena...

In the past 3 days, my website has gone from the top 3 ranking positions all the way to #35 or below. Have I been penalized? Partially penalized?

Specifically, the website used to rank #3 for the term "hip hop samples" for the past six months. Plus, it ranked in the top 4 for several other terms like "fruity loops samples" and "free hip hop samples" etc.

FYI... most of the other competitor sites' rankings for the same terms "hip hop samples" & "fruity loops samples" have remained unchanged while www.modernbeats.com has plummeted.

Kind Regards,
Liam

Kalena's Answer:

Hi Liam

Your site has a Google Toolbar PageRank of 5, plus 68 backward links and Google has indexed nearly 200 pages of your site, so a manual penalty seems unlikely. Have you made a lot of changes to your site lately? Specifically, have you added visible or anchor text for your target phrases? My guess is your site has been sandboxed for competitive terms . See this post for more info.

In terms of your site's search engine compatibility, I can see some glaring issues there:

1) Your home page contains no visible body text apart from visitor testimonials at the bottom. How do you expect search engines to consider your site to be relevant for search queries for your target keywords if you don't actually use those keywords in your body text?

2) Your Title Tag appears to be a little long and not optimized for peak ranking performance or usability. It should ideally be a logical and grammatically correct sentence of 9 or 10 words, incorporating important keywords. Remember that people will see this title in the Favorites list if they bookmark your site.

3) Your META Description Tag is not formatted correctly and appears to be simply a bunch of keywords strung together. Again, this tag should be a grammatically correct sentence or two, incorporating your important keywords in a logical way. People may well see this description of your site in the search engine results pages so it should be enticing enough for them to click on.

4) You are using a technique with your Alt Img attributes that is almost certainly tripping search engine sp@m filters. What you have on your site is one of the worst cases of keyword-stuffed Alt tags that I've ever seen! Your Alt tags should be used to logically describe the images that exist on your site. They were developed primarily to allow accessibility to visually impaired visitors, not as some secret way to trick search engines.

And on that note, you've earned our:

Retro Spam Tactic of the Week!