Google Penalizing Your Site?

...(only my opion after looking at thousands of sites). If aboutus.org outranks you for your domain name, you've got problems and it probably has something to do with links, how you manipulated them, got them, or distributed them.If entire chunks of extremely long tail searches go missing then it's probably because the content is available at 50 other websites, generally this is for your weak travel affiliate type stuff where they just republish hotel descriptions provided by their affiliate provider. I don't consider that a penalty but rather a crap website that deserves to not being seen because it's not bringing anything new to the party, and better ways to sort that information, better graphics, and a cooler template don't constitute anything new.

So it is recommended that one should always check Google Webmaster Tools for any error messages.

A glance at the issues:

• Basically search under your domain name.
• A sudden drop in traffic, can be a hint and can often lead to other reasons that can be discovered at the later stage, but is surely a bad sign that something may be penalized.
• If aboutus.org outranks you for your domain name, then don't take it lightly!

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups

Included links: Search Engine Roundtable

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