Vancouver SEO

How can you tell if your site has been given a penalty?

Its a long tail question with 54,600,000 results in Google, but nobody really seems to have a concrete answer.  I’ve seen some things in my time that I would consider a penality, and I’ve seen some things that are just plain weird.  One of those is Kiwi Collection.  Three of my good SEO friends are working at this website, and they all have been cursed with a seemingly insolvable dilemma:  the homepage refuses to rank.  They have tried many different tests, experiments, pleading to the gods, but still no dice.  What is even more bizarre is that (until recently) their site was ranked as a PR6!  They get front page results for highly competitive keywords like “best luxury hotels”, but their homepage www.kiwicollection.com can’t even be found in the supplimental index.

I took a look at the site a few months back and learned they were inadvertantly hiding text and links due to some technical issues (CSS & Javascript.. go figure).  It was through that investigation that I learned that Google can indeed read onpage CSS, but not linked stylesheets.  So, rule of thumb #1:  Don’t use inline CSS… ever.  Not even as a joke, or a dare.

So, they got the site cleaned up, no hidden text/links and it validates perfectly, but still no love from Google.  They tried another test by putting the same code on an additional page (www.kiwicollection.com/best-hotels.php) and it ranks like gangbusters.  Clearly, they have a poisoned URL, but it is only that URL, and not the site.  I’ve seen page level penalties where a single page will get kicked out of the index, but a perfectly clean page that’s a PR6?  Very odd.

Just recently, their homepage dropped to a PR0.  I suspect that may be due to them adding the link canonical tag pointing that page to /best-hotels.php, and that the PR is being transferred.

It should be interesting to see how it transpires…