Are you one of those webmasters that simply cannot get out of the Google penalty box? Are you convinced you have a penalty that is keeping you from the first page of Google? Have you tried everything and still cannot achieve high rankings in Google?
A WebmasterWorld thread shows one webmaster who has gone through the exhaustive list of changes to his, what he calls, white hat site, to make it even more clean, if that is possible.
Check out this exhaustive list of changes he made to 'fix' his site:
- Fix trailing slash duplicate content issue through a 301 - Fix 'index.php' duplicate content issue through a 301 - Fix 'www' subdomain canonical duplicate content issue through a 301 - Remove all defective and/or thematically irrelevant links - Added a privacy policy - Added a creativecommons licensing statement - Checked robots.txt -> nothing wrong - Checked safebrowsing tool -> nothing wrong - Checked meta tags -> nothing wrong - Added noindex,follow to news index and category pages - Added rel="nofollow" to a button of a thematically relevant high-quality top50 listing - I NEVER purchased or sold a SINGLE link - I added 'nofollow' to my free thematic business listing, just in case G might be thinking I'm selling these positions. - Built a couple of nice high-quality links through guest posting. - Added new quality content on a regular basis - Added a tagcloud to improve crawlability - Added a great deal of relevant wikipedia-like internal linking (as per Ronburk's classic post) - Added noindex,follow on the individual tag-pages to prevent duplicate content - Added the new canonical tag (yep, I am desperate) - Removed interlinking (it was only minor anyways) - Added valid XML Sitemap
He has submitted reconsideration requests to no avail. What should he do? What should you do if you are in this situation?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
