I set up a new directory listing today for a small family business who supply and fit Car audio and car security products.
I got chatting to them and it turned out their website http://www.online-caraudio.co.uk/ had been doing reasonably well in Google until it got hit by the Panda update.
A quick look at the site shows no sign of over optimisation and they have done no link building so why does a site like this get hit by Panda and not others?
A closer look and delve in to the sites source code gives the impression they are using the services of a good SEO now or are doing things correct themselves.
The site is structured so the main content is read first, it is well written, not spammy, is marked up well, and individual pages are using individual templates rather than a default template throughout the site. The anchor text and navigation are as you would expect, in fact it is nearly exactly how I would do it.
So why oh why doen’t it rank better?
The only thing I can see is that it needs a few good strong links pointing at it, but as we all know obtaining links to manipulate search positions is against the Google Guidelines, so just what can a small business like this to to retrieve rankings if it has been hit by the Google Panda update?