Help required as difficulty removing Google algorithmic penalty
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I am not an SEO expert but I am trying to recover my company's ranking on Google. We are a UK based baby shower company. Been established since 2003. We have used SEO companies a few years ago. On September 28th 2012 our rankings in Google dropped significantly on certain landing pages, others like our baby shower gifts page has remained position 1 for UK Google searches . Bing and Yahoo were unaffected. Searches for baby shower and baby shower decorations has gone from position 1 or 2 (behind wikipedia ) to these 2 landing pages being unranked in Google. I have for the first time ever gone through our back links, tried to locate bad or low quality links, emailed where possible, and set up in webmaster tools a dissavow file ( currently not acted upon by Google). I have also amended the text in the baby shower department so it does not read as keyword stuffed. It has been two and a half months now and sales has dropped significantly and me and the staff are getting very concerned. Our site is www.showermybaby.co.uk . We have not received a manual penalty.
Any suggestions or help in removing this Google penalty would be greatly appreciated.
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Hi Patrick,
On the 27th of September, there were two major updates by Google - an EMD update and a subsequent Panda update. Seeing as you don't EMD, it's possible that it was the Panda update that seems to have hit you.
Can I assume that the pages that dropped from rankings were shopping results pages, or pages with pagination? Whereas pages that remain are static pages? The Panda updates address duplicate pages and pages with pagination, so I can imagine that a site like yours probably has a fair amount of what search engines would consider duplicate content. Do you get duplicate content errors in your SEOmoz crawl diagnostics? If that is what you're seeing, then I would recommend canonicalising your pagination pages. http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization
The above is just an idea, and given that I don't think it's a penguin penality (penalises backlinks) overwise your above mentioned fixes should have made some noticeable difference, it will be worth looking into Panda.
Best,
Matt
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