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I've noticed a change in the search results lately. As I search around I notice a lot of results from books.google.com

Seems a little (ok a lot) self serving... JMHO

Thanks for the response. To clarify. We launched this site on this domain in Nov of 2014, so it's been a couple months now. I do understand that things take time, I tell my inbound clients 6 months to see real results. This is a bit different since we can't even get basic rankings.

"Have you resubmitted the site in every available fashion (sitemap, 301 redirects, URL fetching) to Google?" - Yes fetch done, a few times... Sitemaps submitted and auto updated with each new blog post, robots.txt includes a link to the sitemap. Google has recrawled the site multiple times since we launched. I can do a site: and see all our pages, they just won't rank us for keywords (even simple ones).

The other domains didn't add value. All social profiles are pointing to our main domain.

We've also done a couple PR's since the site launched, which of course rank too.

It's unfortunate, but I figure that I might just need to wait for an update, which they seems they are further apart now.

Hi Team - I really need some expert level advice on an issue I'm seeing with our site in Google. Here's the current status. We launched our website and app on the last week of November in 2014 (soft launch): http://goo.gl/Wnrqrq

When we launched we were not showing up for any targeted keywords, long tailed included, even the title of our site in quotes. We ranked for our name only, and even that wasn't #1. Over time we were able to build up some rankings, although they were very low (120 - 140). Yesterday, we're back to not ranking for any keywords.

Here's the history: While developing our app, and before I took over the site, the developer used a thin affiliate site to gather data and run a beta app over the course of 1 - 2 years. Upon taking on the site and moving to launch the new website/app I discovered what had been run under the domain. Since than the old site has been completely removed and rebuild, with all associated urls (.uk, .net, etc...) and subdomains shutdown. I've allowed all the old spammy pages (thousands of them to 404). We've disavowed the old domains (.net, .uk that were sending a ton of links to this), along with some links that seemed a little spammy that were pointing to our domain. There are no manual actions or messaged in Google Webmaster Tools.

The new website uses (SSL) https for the entire site, it scores a 98 / 100 for a mobile usability (we beat our competitors on Google's PageSpeed Tool), it has been moved to a business level hosting service, 301's are correctly setup, added terms and conditions, have all our social profiles linked, linked WMT/Analytics/YouTube, started some Adwords, use rel="canonical", all the SEO 101 stuff ++. When I run the page through the moz tool for a specific keyword we score an A. When I did a crawl test everything came back looking good. We also pass using other tools. Google WMT, shows no html issues. We rank well on Bing, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo. However, for some reason Google will not rank the site, and since there is no manual action I have no course of action to submit a reconsideration request.

From an advanced stance, should we bail on this domain, and move to the .co domain (that we own, but hasn't been used before)? If we 301 this domain over, since all our marketing is pointed to .com will this issue follow us? I see a lot of conflicting information on algorithmic issues following domains. Some say they do, some say they don't, some say they do since a lot of times people don't fix the issue. However, this is a brand new site, and we're following all of Google's rules.

I suspect there is an algorithmic penalty (action) against the domain because of the old thin affiliate site that was used for the beta and data gathering app. Are we stuck till Google does an update? What's the deal with moving us up, than removing again?

Thoughts, suggestions???

I purposely, did a short url to leave out the company name, please respect that, since I don't want our issues to popup on a web search.

I've noticed a change in the search results lately. As I search around I notice a lot of results from books.google.com

Seems a little (ok a lot) self serving... JMHO