Is my site being penalized?
-
I've gone through all the points on https://mza.bundledseo.com/blog/technical-site-audit-for-2015 but the site only ranks for its brand name after months. The website is not ranking in the top 100 for any main keywords (2,3,4 word phrases), only for a handful of very long phrases (4+).
All of the content is unique, all pages are indexed, the website is fast and doesn't contain any crawl errors and there are a couple of links pointing to it.
There is a sitewide follow link in the footer pointing to another domain, its parent company and vice-versa. This is not done for any SEO reasons but the companies are related and also the products are supplementary of each other. Could this be an issue? Or is my site being penalized by something else?
-
Micha,
After looking at your site and running a few quick tests, I still don't think your site has been penalized. You have a few technical and on-page issues to deal with, but I don't think fixing these alone will catapult you to the top of the SERPs.
I checked the SERPs for "climb kilimanjaro," and I think your competition is your biggest hurdle. In addition to being around a lot longer, your competitor's websites have far more targeted, editorial backlinks, and consequently much higher authority, than your site.
Unfortunately, there's no quick and easy fix for this problem. You'll have to work toward earning good backlinks. Check out the resources below.
-
Hi All,
Thank you for your answers. I'm glad to hear that most of you think that the single sitewide link wouldn't caused a penalty from Google. If this wouldn't be allowed by Google, how else could one promote their other related sites?
@Laura: To give a bit more information, the domain was registered in November 2014 and the website including content has been live since the beginning of 2015. I realize that this is not long ago but I've seen a lot more progress for other domains by this stage. There has some link building happened over the last months; initially a handful of strong directories, partners and a couple of articles (not indexed by OSE yet). Furthermore, we are asking past customers to leave reviews on various website and mention us if they have a blog or written a trip report somewhere. The website is of a tour operator that organizes trekking tours up Kilimanjaro. For more information you can visit the web address www.kilimanjaro-experience.com. I would be very intrigued to hear your advice on this matter.
@Patrick: Thanks for the resources! I'll go through them. WMT hasn't indicated that there are any manual actions and OSE indicates a spam score of only 2.
@Andy: Nofollow might be a good idea if this is the issue though. I've done some digging into the competition's links and besides 2 very strong links it's all a bit average and some even quite spammy with links in comments etc. I definitely don't want to go that route. Got any good contacts at renowned newspapers?
-
Hi Micha,
I doubt very much that a single link like this is causing you issues, but there would be no harm in no-following it, just to be on the safe side.
and there are a couple of links pointing to it.
You might find that this is playing a major part. It is possible for a site to rank without links, but the content would have to be pretty amazing and really tick all the boxes for Google.
Do you feel the content on you site would be classified as a linkable asset? Would what is there be reason enough for others to want to link to you? Have you had a look at those who are winning in the SERPs to see where they get their links from, and why? A little competition analysis might open up a sea of opportunities, or at least let you see what needs doing.
-Andy
-
Hi there
If everything you say is true - highly doubtful. But run through the technical checklist one more time in case there is a noindex tag or an issue with your robots.txt.
You have to be doing some pretty shady content and link building tactics in order to trip Google penalty signals. I would go through any links you have to see if there are spammy efforts there (resource below)
However, to be sure, login to your Webmaster Tools account and check your manual action notifications.
If nothing there, I would look at the following materials:
How To Do a Content Audit - Step-by-Step (Moz)
How to Conduct a Link Audit (SEW)
Link Audit Guide for Effective Link Removals & Risk Mitigation (Moz)
How to Perform the Ultimate Local SEO Audit (Moz)
The Illustrated SEO Competitive Analysis Workflow (Moz - I put this here for ideas, not copycat tactics)
Conducting Market Research Before Investing in Tactical Execution (Moz)I would also look and see if there are any opportunities to amplify your content or if there are any advertising opportunities that can help get your name out there and help you relationship build with potential partners.
Lastly, while tedious, I highly recommend persona development - reason being, going through the exercise is necessary and you learn more than ever about who your audience is; there may be content or ideas that you are missing out on.
Like I said, if you are up to par with the checklist and you have value on your website, go through the above resources as they can help you build your brand and get more traction going. It's an uphill battle, but one worth fighting when all is said and done.
Hope this all helps! Good luck!
-
I doubt that a single sitewide reciprocal footer link is causing your site to be penalized. There are dozens of possible reasons why your site is not ranking, and it's impossible to say what's going on without knowing the website in question. If you don't want to post it here, send me the URL in a private message and I'll take a look.
- How long has your site been online?
- Has anyone conducted a link building campaign for you at any time? If so, what did they do?
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Why does some sites rank with no seo
Why is it that some site rank with zero efforts? I have been working on some seo for a while on my main site and i have been getting more info competition analysis with sem and moz. Looking at the states from this website which tends to popup often in the searches on page 1-2 before my site. This site is not keyword optimized, meaning they arent even trying to rank.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CooperStrzelecki
There is no content, articles etc.,
6 backlinks (nothing powerful just 2 directory links and 2 from developer)
Site really isnt even designed to get traffic as its a trade only ecommerce website
I doubt they are hiding anything as far as backlinks etc. as it will get them too many visitors they dont want
The city i am searching isnt even on the page (it is a city within a city so maybe google still relates it)
PA 24 DA 15 Now my site:
Optimized reasearched keywords
175 backlinks
All my main pages have content with images, alt tags, internal linking
full of content, blogs, videos, products (probably 4000, could a site being too big be an issue?)
Site gets regular updates
I probably have 200 citations
All the social media which gets done often
PA 32 DA 20 They do get a good bit of traffic but that is probably the only thing i would see but it would be direct traffic mostly i believe as it would be people going to order regularly since it is a print reseller. They may have some age on me 15 vs 8 years. Could it be some kind of penalty i am not sure about lingering? According to what i know to check everyything looks ok, no shady links accoding to sem. I am working more and more on all the pages but this competittion site really doesnt have crap going on probably 8 pages and 1 page does all the ordering. What the hell does google want from me exactly!0 -
Traffic drop on this site
I am SEO'ing this site but need some assistance in the analysis. it was doing not too bad but in the last 4 months the google traffic has really fallen off, i suspect the keywords may need improving but any tips or observations would be great.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | crowng0 -
Dealing with 404s during site migration
Hi everyone - What is the best way to deal with 404s on an old site when you're migrating to a new website? Thanks, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Keyword phrase for entire site
Hey everyone! I'm fairly new to SEO but I have a large number of sites I'm needing to SEO. I'm a tad confused as to how many keyword phrases I should use throughout my site. For example, my site is www.uluru.travel. I want to rank highlight for the phrase 'uluru tours' throughout the site, as many of my pages list uluru tours and people searching for this phrase are my type of customers. As you can see I've tried to do some basic on page SEO for that phrase by including it in page title, headings etc. But the entire site doesn't seem to rank very well. Would you guys suggest trying to target 'uluru tours' phrase throughout the entire site of just focus a couple of pages on this term? Any advice is greatly appreciated guys! Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mysites0 -
Should I redirect images when I migrate my site
We are about to migrate a large website with a fair few images (20,000). At the moment we include images in the sitemap.xml so they are indexed by Google and drive traffic (not sure how I can find out how much though). Current image slugs are like:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ArchMedia
http://website.com/assets/images/a2/65680/thumbnails/638x425-crop.jpg?1402460458 Like on the old site, images on the new website will also have unreadable cache slugs, like:
http://website.com/site_media/media/cache/ce/7a/ce7aeffb1e5bdfc8d4288885c52de8e3.jpg All content pages on the new site will have the same slugs as on the old site. Should I go through the trouble of redirecting all these images?0 -
Bad site migration - what to do!
Hi Mozzers - I'm just looking at a site which has been damaged by a very poor site migration. Basically, the old URLs were 301'd to a page on the new website (not a 404) telling everyone the page no longer existed. They did not 301 old pages to equivalent new pages. So I just checked Google WMT and saw 1,000 crawl errors - basically the old URLs. This migration was done back in February, since when traffic to the website has never recovered. Should I fix this now? Is it worth implementing the correct 301s now, after such a timelapse?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
How to remove an entire site from Google?
Hi people, I have a site with around 2.000 urls indexed in google, and 10 subdomains indexed too, which I want to remove entirely, to set up a new web. Which is the best way to do it? Regards!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SeoExpertos0 -
Acquisition of a new site in the same field.
Hello, I work with SEO for a company that just bought another in the same field. What is better to do? Just a 301 domain? Make 301 per page for a related page (more than 10,000 URLs, i'am afraid that this may be interpreted as blackhat ) or make crossdomain canonical tag urls related to (I believe this is not good, because the pages are not fully equal). thank's
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | j0a0vargas0