How to find out if I have been penalized?
-
I have launched a new website beginning January this year and have seen slowly more and more traffic coming from google to the website until the 20th of March where suddenly there are no more visitors from the google search engine. The only traffic left is from google images, social networks or other search engines. Without visitors from google search this reduces our overall traffic by ~66%.
I can't easily find anymore our website in the search results of google by using terms which we usually ranked quite well. Nevertheless, the website is still indexed as I can find it using the "site:" search query. In google webmaster tools there are no messages and we have only been doing a bit of link building on website and blog directories (nothing excessive and nothing paid neither).
Is there any way to find out if google penalized my website? I guess it has... and what would be the best thing to do right now?
The website is hellasholiday (dot) com
Thanks in advance for your idea and suggestions
-
I am not a fan of CMS, i realize there are pros and cons, but when you try to do too much and be all things to all people you tend to have a lot of compromises.
There is one other reason i dont like to use robots,txt, i remeber Matt Cutts saying that it is a spam signal because they can not see what you are hiding, not that it is going to get you flaged by itself, but with other signals it can. If i remember correctly he was talking about hiding malware in scripts blocked by robots.
If you are interested, the best CMS for SEO i had found was Orchard CMS but even that has some silly errors, it puts more then one H1 tag in pages, but is still the best solution I have looked at. It is more customizable via code.
-
After having read your post and all the linked articles you have recommended I understand the issue and have adapted the robots.txt accordingly. Basically only leaving one single Disallow for the WordPress plugins. I hope this will help but I suppose I will see this in the next few days...
Now regarding WordPress I would suggest them to adapt their documentation as it is really misleading. Also I think they should implement all these noindex meta tags where necessary natively into wordpress and not by having to use a plugin for that, but this is another story.
-
Wordpress do many things that are not recommened, and blocking by robots is not recomened, what they are suggesting is a extream messure to solve the softewares problems. there are better ways to solve duplicate content without giveing away your link juice
Read this section "WordPress Robots.txt blocking Search results and Feeds"
on this page http://yoast.com/example-robots-txt-wordpress/
These plug-ins like yoast and word press itself, do not produse very good results. I have crawled many wordpress sites and they all have the same old problems many caused by the yoast plugin.
What google is refereing to in the link, is not getting pages of little value into their index, this is for their advantage not yours.
Its quite simple, if you block a page, the links pointing to that page waste their link juice, if you dont, or at least allow follow with a meta tag, you will get the link juice back.
See this article where Dr Pets calls it an extream messure, search for robots.txt you will see many comments refering to my point http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world
See Dr pets comments here http://www.seomoz.org/blog/serious-robotstxt-misuse-high-impact-solutions
-
I thought it would be no use for google to index and cache small icons, logos and cached resized images which have no meaningful name or so. So now I have at least removed the Disallow for these but for WordPress blog I want to keep the Disallow rules as recommended by WordPress itself for SEO purposes as documented here http://codex.wordpress.org/Search_Engine_Optimization_for_WordPress#Robots.txt_Optimization assuming they know what they are speaking about.
Anyhow I don't have the feeling this is really the problem why my website doesn't show up anymore in the google search engine results...
-
The question should be why block them?
its like cutting off your hand, because you have a splinter.
If duplicate content is a problem, then you can (in order of prefrance) fix it, use a canonical, a noindex,follow meta tag, but not robots
-
Many thanks Alan for your answer!
Regarding the robots.txt, basically I just would like to block/disallow some cached images and small icons/pictures from the website as well as some stuff for the associated WordPress blog which is also host on the same website. For the blog I am disallowing the admin pages, feeds, comments, trackbacks, content theme files etc. Here wold be the complete list just in case:
Disallow /wp-admin
Disallow: /wp-includes
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins
Disallow: /wp-content/cache
Disallow: /wp-content/themes
Disallow: /trackback
Disallow: /feed
Disallow: /comments
Disallow: /category//
Disallow: /*/trackback
Disallow: /*/feed
Disallow: /*/comments
Disallow: /?
Disallow: /*?
So maybe I should change my question to "what URLs should I disallow for a WordPress blog?"
Also where can I see all the pages which are blocked by my robots.txt file?
-
You can ask for reconsideration from google though webmaster tools. But since you have no warnings and you are still in the index, i have doubts that you have been flagegd manualaly, but you may have been algorthmicly.
I notived that you have blokced hundreds of pages with robots.txt, thios had led to thousonds of links pointing to pages that are not indexed, this means these links are puiring away link juice into nowhere.
You should not use robots text to block pages that are linked to, its a waste of valuable link juice.
if you must no-index the pages, use a meta noindex,follow tag, this way you will get most of the link juice back though the pages outlinks
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Will Google Also Penalize Desktop Rankings If Your Site is Not Mobile Friendly?
Apologies if this question has already been answered. I was unable to find it. For desktop organic rankings: Will Google take into consideration mobile-readiness as a ranking factor? Thanks in advance for any reply, Kind regards,
Technical SEO | | Eric_Lifescript
Eric Darby1 -
How to find all crawlable links on a particular page?
Hi! This might sound like a newbie question, but I'm trying to find all crawlable links (that google bot sees), on a particular page of my website. I'm trying to use screaming frog, but that gives me all the links on that particular page, AND all subsequent pages in the given sub-directory. What I want is ONLY the crawlable links pointing away from a particular page. What is the best way to go about this? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | AB_Newbie0 -
Its now been 12 days since since google notified me that my manul link penality was revoke.. how long before I'm reindexed?
Hi, Its been 12 days since google revoked the manual link penalty they had one me, I'm still ranking 335 for my domain keyword, there has been no movement yet.. Googlebot spiders my site daily, and I have also tried resubmitting the page from within GWT, Fetch Web Page.. How long do you think it should be before I see some movement...? or should I file another reconsideration request just incase they forgot to remove the penalty and just thought they did.. Thanks,
Technical SEO | | Robdob20130 -
How can I best find out which URLs from large sitemaps aren't indexed?
I have about a dozen sitemaps with a total of just over 300,000 urls in them. These have been carefully created to only select the content that I feel is above a certain threshold. However, Google says they have only indexed 230,000 of these urls. Now I'm wondering, how can I best go about working out which URLs they haven't indexed? No errors are showing in WMT related to these pages. I can obviously manually start hitting it, but surely there's a better way?
Technical SEO | | rango0 -
Should I delete a page or remove links on a penalized page?
Hello All, If I have a internal page that has low quality links point to it or a penality. Can I just remove the page, and start over versus trying to remove the links? Over time wouldn't this page disapear along with the penalty on that page? Kinda like pruning a tree? Cutting off the junk limbs so other could grow stronger, or to start new fresh ones. Example: www.domain.com Penalized Internal Page: (Say this page is penalized due to keyword stuffing, and has low quality links pointing to it like blog comments, or profiles) www.domain.com/penalized-internal-page.com Would it be effective to just delete this page (www.domain.com/penalized-internal-page.com) and start over with a new page. New Internal Page: www.domain.com/new-internal-page.com I would of course lose any good links point to that page, but it might be easier then trying to remove old back links. Thoughts? Thanks! Pete
Technical SEO | | Juratovic0 -
Way to find how many sites within a given set link to a specific site?
Hi, Does anyone have an idea on how to determine how many sites within a list of 50 sites link to a specific site? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | SparkplugDigital0 -
How to find local search engines in all countries to submit sitemap?
hi, i want to submit sitemap to search engines as many as possible, but i can't find them. anyone can help me?
Technical SEO | | Litb0 -
I have a penalized site and don't know what the cause is
I have a site which appears to have a Google indexation penalty. According to Google because its violating the T/Cs. Here are some background details about the site: The site is a online poker + deposit methods related site on a .co.uk TLD. It has 30+ uniquely written pages, and no advertising at the moment. In June of 2010, June 10 to be precisely, I bought this site from a fellow webmaster/affiliate. After the site 's ownership changed I tried accessing the server, but I couldn't log into it . I noticed that this host had serious problems and the IP was unreachable. After trying for some time the previous owner got me all the content in Word files and I created a new hosting account and re-launched the site on June 28. Between a couple of days after June 10 and June 28, the site was unreachable, and completely de-indexed from Google. When I re-launched the site, I used the default Wordpress Template Twenty Ten, and created new pages with the Word files I received from the previous owner. I waited a bit, but noticed the site didn't get re-indexed. So on August 18th I moved the content of domain xxx.com to yyy.co.uk/xxx/ and 301-ed all the former locations, hoping that this might help yyy.co.uk get indexed..... but nothing. On October 28 of 2010 I submitted my first reconsideration request, which was processed on November 17th without any change. At that time Google didn't say if anything was wrong like now, so I just waited... and waited... and waited some more. At some point I was ready to let this one go, as I didn't/don't see any problems with it. In fact, it used to be indexed before. By now, I removed all links pointing to it that I had control off, and there are hardly any left over. The site as well doesn't have any outgoing links left, so that can't be it either. I also removed a kind-a duplicate keyword heavy menu from the sidebar, as well as the widgets from the footer. Finally I also fixed a problem caused by Yoast Wordpress SEO Plugin, but I only installed this plugin recently, so that could not be the problem that caused the penalty. So after another reconsideration request Google again let me know this site still has issues, but I really have no clue which, or how to find out. I don't feel like doing any work on this site, as there is no guarantee that it will ever lose its penalty. What should I do now?
Technical SEO | | VisualSense0