Google Penalty, Which one is hitting me?
-
Hello there SEOMOZ'ers,
Just signed up for a Pro Account. Impressed with the trial. Just wondering is there any way to find out if you have fallen foul of a Google update, is there any way to know which you have fallen foul of or is the date it happens the only guide or pointer to what might have happened?
My site was getting a reasonable amount of traffic for the last few years and was ranking well for my main search terms up till Feburary the 4th when the traffic fell by almost 50% ... and it has never really recovered.
I thought it might be the Above the Fold Advertising penalty (or whatever it is called) because I had a lot of images linking elsewhere on my site, above the fold on my homepage, but I removed them about 4 weeks ago and the traffic still hasnt recovered.
I've been using SEOMOZ to detect duplicate content and various other problems with my site since and fixing a good few of them each week. I have the main issues down from about 300 to about 20 which i think i have just fixed.
I have also used Copyscape and found that some other websites had stolen some of my content, which i have since rewritten.
I was ranking number 2 or 3 for my main keyword but dropped out of the top 100 in February, which is pretty frustrating at this stage. I don;t know if I have accidentally gone too far over optimising my site or what has happened.
If anyone can give me some pointers I'd really appreciate it, if anyone can help me fix it I'll buy them a beer next time you are in Ireland!
Thanks,
Shane
-
Sounds a risky strategy Toyz! Good luck with it!
-
Hi All,
I hope this works what I have done is. I looked at my webmastertools account and identified those pages that have obviously too may links about 5 pages have some 1500 links pointing to them. I have made hard 404s. I changed the page urls. I asked google to remove them from the index and I disallowed them in my robots.txt. I am hoping that this will then mean that those incoming links are no longer an issue. I resubmitted my site for inclusion and am waiting on an answer.Apparently this process takes some time
What this means of course is that those pages now have no incoming links so I have to start my seo for them all over again. Very carefully this time.
Of course I am in trouble if there are too many spammy links pointing to my homepage. So I am writing to webmasters of not so good neighbourhood sites and asking them to remove links to my site from theirs.
My google organic traffic is about 1/6 what it was so I have carefully increased adwords spend and am doing heaps more email marketting to keep sales up. BTW have also fired my SEO firm
-
If I was to resubmit my site for review am i any more likely to get feedback from Google as to the problem?
-
Thanks Blocker - it must be a penalty alright because it is such a sharp and sudden decrease in traffic.
Where do I go from here?
-
To make the whole google thing even more confusing, many sites are getting hit with no message. So, if you don't have the message, you may well still have been penalised.
Absolute carnage and the serps have gone back to the stone age. Google has well and truly lost it.
-
So if you have a Google Penalty you should get a message in web-master tools? I don't have a message in there, in fact the only real problem I can see in web-master tools now is a lot of my pages have the same meta description which I'll work on now but that is unlikely to be the full issue, is it?
-
and what ve you done I ve the same problem: penalty for innatural link.
I don't know what can I do bacause of I ve not do much more of this link.
I ve no paied link no take part to farm and so on.
Sorry for my english but I m an Italian girl please Help me.
-
Hi Shane,
Same thing just happened to me. I have ranked well for many of my keywords for years. On April 13 my site received a google penalty for to many unnatural links. The message appeared in my webmastertools account.
Regards Colin
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
-
Need advice on overcoming a Google penalty
Here is the situation. Our website for our primary product (www.thetablift.com) has received a penalty by Google. Not long ago we had excellent rankings; (1st page) for some of our primary keywords, like "tablet stand". Now we are not in the index at all. Here is what happened (or at least what seems to have happened in my non-SEO opinion). Around October 2016, we had the "bright" idea to try and emulate a campaign that Eat 24 did, utilizing inexpensive traffic from advertisements on porn websites. The idea was a play on a joke we often hear about our product being perfect for certain activities where one needs to free one's hands while watching a screen. Of course this is not how we market our product (it is a best selling mainstream product), but we wanted to see if we could emulate the success of another mainstream brand that utilized this kind of non-mainstream advertising. The immediate result was a whole lot of traffic, but obviously the wrong kind, as it did not convert. So we pulled the plug after about 3 days. Flash forward several months later and we not only lost our great SEO rankings, but we were removed from Google's index entirely. I assume the reason for this is that somehow the website got dinged for being somehow related to porn. But of course it has nothing to do with that. So the question is: how do we go about getting un-penalized by Google? We had build up some solid SEO over the previous couple of years, and I'd like to get back to where we were, if possible. Oh, and this may or may not be relevant, but we also switched from www.tablift.com to www.thetablift.com a few months before we did this campaign. However, we used permanent redirects and did a textbook changeover, so I don't think that had any bearing. But I can't be sure. What are the steps to reverse this damage, if any? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | csblev0 -
Silly Question still - Because I am paying high to google adwords is it possible google can't rank me high in organic?
Hello All, My ecommerce site gone in penalty more than 3 years before and within 3 months I got message from google penalty removed. Since then till date my organic ranking is very worst. In this 3 years I improved my site onpage very great. If I compare my site with all other competitors who are ranking in top 10 then my onpage that includes all schema, reviews, sitemap, header tags, meta's etc, social media, site structure, most imp speed, google page speed insight score, pingdom, w3c errors, alexa rank, global rank, UI, offers, design, content, code to text raito, engagement rate, page views, time on site etc all my sites always good compare to competitors. They also have few backlinks I do have few backlinks only. I am doing very high google adwords and my conversion rate is very very good. But do you think because I am paying since last 3 year high to google because of that google have some setting or strategy that those who perform well in adwords so not to bring up in organic? Is it possible I can talk with google on this? If yes then what will be the medium of conversation? Pls give some valuable inputs I am performing very much in paid so user end site is very very well. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pragnesh96390 -
Google News and Meta Title
Hi,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPalmer
1. I just read this article: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-news-titles-h1-19876.html
Google want the same title. no problem. but what about the brand? for example
POST TITLE BLA BLU | My Brand
The "post title bla blu" is the H1 and title of the article and | My Brand is my brand...
I can keep it as is with the My brand? or remove it? what about posts with long title for example "POST TITLE BLA BLU POST TITLE BLA BLU | My Brand"
What is you suggestion, I know Google doesn't show all the text and we'll see "...". it's still important to write the brand name in the title or just the post title? (without the brand). Thanks,0 -
Google snippet chosen why?
We have a page about buying property in the Megeve area of the Alps in France. We are No.2 on Google.co.uk for the term "megeve property for sale" and No.1 for "megeve property". http://www.prestigeproperty.co.uk/MegeveProperty/Properties.asp If you search for "megeve property for sale", Google serves our META description as the snippet: Ski chalets, homes and apartments for sale in this exclusive, prestigious Rhone Alpes village - 520000-16500000 EUR. However, we noticed that searching for just "megeve property" serves up a much better snippet taken from the text on the page: A crucial factor for potential property buyers is that there is a strong rental market in Megève and this remains high all year around with properties close to the ... Does anyone know why Google would serve this particular snippet instead of the META description. Is it the number of strong and descriptive words used, or some other reason?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PPGUKLTD0 -
Google images
Hi, I am working on a website with a large number (millions) of images. For the last five months Ihave been trying to get Google Images to crawl and index these images (example page: http://bit.ly/1ePQvyd). I believe I have followed best practice in the design of the page, naming of images etc. Whilst crawlng and indexing of the pages is going reasonably well with the standard crawler, the image bot has only crawled about half a million images and indexed only about 40,000. Can anyone suggest what I could do to increase this number 100 fold? Richard
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RichardTay0 -
My Website Has a Google Penalty, But I Can't Disavow Links
I have a client who has definitely been penalized, rankings dropped for all keywords and hundreds of malicious backlinks when checked with WebMeUp....However, when I run the backlink portfolio on Moz, or any other tool, they don't appear anyone, and all the links are dead when I click on the actual URL. That being said, I can't disavow links that don't exist, and they don't show up in Webmaster Tools, but I KNOW this site has been penalized. Also- I noticed this today (attached). Any suggestions? I've never come across this issue before. xT6JNJC.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 01023450 -
Site not indexed in Google UK
This site was moved to a new host by the client a month back and is still not indexed in Google UK if you search for the site directly. www.loftconversionswestsussex.com Webmaster tools shows that 55 pages have been crawled and no errors have been detected. The client also tried the "Fetch as Google Bot" tactic in GWT as well as running a PPC campaign and the site is still not appearing in Google. Any thoughts please? Cheers, SEO5..
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO5Team0 -
Limit on Google Removal Tool?
I'm dealing with thousands of duplicate URL's caused by the CMS... So I am using some automation to get through them - What is the daily limit? weekly? monthly? Any ideas?? thanks, Ben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100