Please help - My site is being penalized for something

[PokerSpnsor2-0]

Hi my site is in my sig.

My problem is this - my site gets a hubspot grade of 97 and is generally I think well optimized but I can not seem to rank for some reason.

I came across a backlink the other day from a unknown site so I contacted them and asked them to remove it and the webmaster kindly agreed.

Please could someone look at my site and tell me why I can not seem to get Google to rank me,

Also does anyone know how or where this backlink came from,

Thanks Richard

[Simmo!]

According to Whois, the domain is only 3 months old. Coupled with the fact it contains a hyphen in the name and is up against established sites I'm inclined to think it's just a question of being patient. You rank Top 10 on Google for (the somewhat niche term) "poker sponsor 2" which suggests to me that there is no site-wide penalty applied.

Just an educated guess mind you.

GL

Simmo!

[PokerSpnsor2-0]

Thanks for the info.

Do you think I could be sandboxed as I used to have an old site with old domain, then I transferred old site from host to host and deleted my old domain which was a 4 year plus with my old site which was no way near as well optimized as this one was ranked page 1 or 2

I read somewhere that you can be sandboxed for transferring domain names or host to host.

Thanks anyway

[patmcluk]

Hey I think you are trying to run before you walk!
A 3 month old site is not ranking for your keyword lol!

I just checked and:
You have 97 backlinks on Yahoo
ZERO on Bing
You have 414 indexed pages on Google

I have also just checked google top 1000 rankings for "Poker Sponsorship" and you are quite highly placed at 254 (plus 526/7/

Stop complaining and start building some links or you will never reach the top 100

[Gokke]

Acrding to http://www.opensiteexplorer.org you have links from only 5 different domains so I agree with patmcluk that you should start focusing on getting good links.

[PokerSpnsor2-0]

Hi thanks for the reply, I have no idea where to start getting backlinks.

Should I pay for them? How is the best way to get new backlinks? Where can I get good ones from?

Am I in Google's sandbox? (still page 1 Yahoo) and I have recently moved my domain. Also I might have submitted to a lot of search engines using a submitter.

Sorry for being a noob

[Prenut]

1) wait - pretty much what simmo said. You have a very new domain
2) don't go out trying to get tons of links- you don't need a heavy influx of links to rank for anything, and certainly not for "poker sponsorship". It's a non competitive term
3) remove the text from the bottom of the page "poker sponsorship". It was put there for no apparent reason other than a weak attempt at manipulating search. It's way to close to the same color as the background, and things like this never help you but can get you bitchslapped.
4) wait some more

[jctroy440]

Your home page has 14.75% Keyword Density on the word Poker

Google likes less than 10% on she may mark you as a spammer. (just a thought)

Just a suggestion and I'm sure I will be pummeled with rebuke as most logical suggestions always are in this forum

[PokerSpnsor2-0]

Thanks for all the info guy's, I will take it all into account.

I found one problem last night was that I had text which was the same colour as the background not "poker sponsorship" at the bottom of pages but 2 full articles so I have changed that and I reckon that when I get crawled next it might rank me up, also I was ranked page 40 but after I changed the text I am now page 10-11.

I will also tone down the use of keywords, I had someone helping me telling me to jam as many keywords in as possible but I see now that wasn't the way to go.

Meta descriptions and titles - If I use stop words is it bad? will it damage rankings as I think they read better with a few stop words in there any comments much appreciated as always.

Does anyone know when backlink checkers update?

Thanks again guys

[jctroy440]

Google Webmaster and other back link services run about two to four weeks behind in their updating. Be patient. Having an overall site rating is not nearly as important as having 15 or 20 of your individual html pages on a particular front page search.

If you want to know where you stand, go to Google search and type in

Site:www yourdomain com

Links:www yourdomain com

This will give you an up to date assessment on where your really at.

Cheers

[GaGaGirl]

@jctroy440, how did you figure out how dense his keywords were? Do you have a tool for that?

[PokerSpnsor2-0]

Guy's I am so happy today! I finished my night shift got home and did the dreaded search for "poker sponsorship" voilà page 1 and "poker sponsor"

I found the problem well 2 of them,

1 - my web guy had used same colour text as background (dumbo)

2 - I removed the lame attempt at having relevant headings that my web guy had put on (I asked for text behind my logo not the bottom of every page in same coloured text)

Anyway I am so happy and I am very grateful to you all for putting up with me and helping me solve the puzzle aka SEO

Thanks again guys for all the help!

[thepokerkeep]

@jctroy440, how did you figure out how dense his keywords were? Do you have a tool for that?

Quirk SearchStatus (toolbar) has a keyword density tool. Plus there is this one....
http://www.webuildpages.com/seo-tools/keyword-density/

[jctroy440]

Food for thought.
Google likes to see about 8-10% keyword density count.
Lets assume you have 250 words and 10 are keywords. You will have about 4% keyword density.

Now if you reduce the TOTAL amount of words to 150 and add 3 keywords you now have 8.66% keyword density without stuffing ten more words in.

So if you get rid of the slag and concentrate on quality descriptions with strategically placed and proper amounts of keywords you will never be penalized.

[best.hands]

Food for thought.
Google likes to see about 8-10% keyword density count.
Lets assume you have 250 words and 10 are keywords. You will have about 4% keyword density.

I always thought that 2-6% is the safest keyword density to hit for a keyword in a page. This I got from ebooks and online resources I've come across. Could you tell me your resources for this? And what tool do you use to your your pages' keyword density?