Google Penalty Checklist: Rank Drop Troubleshooting Guide - Duplicate Content and Inbound Links
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Does your site has substantial duplicate content across pages within and outside of your domain?
It is possible you have more than one indexed version of your home page. To spot this, take a sample phrase (one sentence is enough) and copy and paste it into a Yahoo or Google search box. Put quotation marks around it to emphasize that you are making an exact query. Example : “This is my first experience with site building and I hope my instructor gives me a good grade”
It is possible that you have more than one result for this. If you do, it means that you have a duplicate content issue. You should consider blocking those duplicates or 301 redirecting them to your canonical home page. You can, however, check the percentage of similarity for those pages with respect to your home page by using this tool:http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php
The result should also tell you whether there are exact duplicates of your pages outside the domain. Take note of this; you can also double check withhttp://www.copyscape.com/
Warning:Do not fall into the trap of assuming that duplicate content will cause a penalty. It simply means that the search engines will filter your pages, which otherwise should rank higher than those duplicates. If any substantial duplicates are found, shut them down or link them to all of your canonical pages. This will sort out this issue.
What is the quality of your outbound and inbound links?
Be completely honest. Have you been buying links and placing those links on the footer section of highly unrelated domains, or on spammy link pool pages? This is the time for you to forcefully ask them to entirely remove those links and submit a Google reconsideration request.
Now, does your site link out to completely unrelated domains that provide no value to your visitors? Please remove all of those links, and then check all of the external links on your domain one by one. Unchecked external domains are a sign of carelessness, and one of the main reasons a site does not perform well in search results. This is especially true if you have link pages, directories within your domain, and/or forums that pass link juice. You can use Xenu sleuth, located athttp://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.htmlto entirely scan your domain for external links. During the setup, please uncheck “Check external links,” then filter all external links into a spreadsheet.
Make sure all external links are pointing to highly authoritative and relevant sites that are trusted by Google. When looking at each link, ask yourself this question: "Does it help my visitors?" If not, then remove it.
Put rel=nofollow tags on to forum links, blog comments, and everything that does not need to be associated with your site.
What if you have gone through this check list, and everything seems fine? Then you are not being penalized; you are just losing out to your competitors. Consider doing some ethical SEO work on your site. You can learn more about SEO for free in the SEO Chat forums:http://forums.seochat.com/
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