Why is our site being penalized?
-
The rankings for our transcription site (gmr transcription) fell around Jul 19. Its been an uphill task to get the rankings back particularly for the keyword 'transcription services'. As per our opinion except for one competitor the rankings of the other top 4 makes no sense to us.
We have tested our site and there seems to be no reason for it to be penalized.
After a month of trial I am reaching out to the community for advise.
-
Well that's good news...and a little bit strange too! It's possible that there is a Penguin update in the works, but there's no official word as of yet.
I'm tempted to think that there was something other than Penguin going on here. But, regardless, I'm glad to hear you are ranking again!
-
Marie, thanks for responding. No we did not get any warnings. I had no idea that a site could be "Penguinzed" so late after an update.
Greg and Maximize suggested altering the site wide link status. We had control over two of our sister websites. We corrected that and hey within an hour we were back!
Seems like magic!
-
Do you have any warnings of unnatural links in your webmaster tools? If so, the answer is to do a thorough cleanup of your links, documenting everything you do in order to try to get the self made ones removed and submit a reconsideration request.
Otherwise, you may be a victim of Penguin. I used to think you could only get "Penguinized" on the date of a Penguin update, but I've seen evidence of sites that have been affected in very similar ways to Penguin within a few weeks of launching a backlinking campaign. As others have mentioned, if your backlinks are primarily anchor text, and you're dropping in the serps for that particular anchor text, then you need to get those links changed to your url or removed.
Sometimes, if you're not sure, it's a good idea to hire a professional to look at your backlink profile and advise you which links need to go.
If this is a Penguin thing (as opposed to an unnatural links warning in WMT) then you have no chance of recovery until there is a Penguin refresh.
-
I checked the keyword transcription services position in Google Singapore and Google USA. I see it has position of Number 3 and 1 respectively.
But if you think anything wrong has happened, you must follow what has been suggested by others here. Besides, i would like to add which for me is the most striking the moment you open the page. The occurrence of keyword "transcription" is approximately 66 times on the home page.
Excessive use of keywords can negatively impact rankings and should be avoided.
-
I checked the keyword transcription services position in Google Singapore and Google USA. I see it has position of Number 3 and 1 respectively.
But if you think anything wrong has happened, you must follow what has been suggested by others here. Besides, i would like to add which for me is the most striking the moment you open the page. The occurrence of keyword "transcription" is approximately 66 times on the home page.
Excessive use of keywords can negatively impact rankings and should be avoided.
-
Thanks Maximise. I will try and rectify the link pattern. Most of the links are old and will be very difficult to moderate.
-
Thanks Greg.
Sangeeta, At the moment these are your top anchor text terms:
- transcription services - 882 links
- transcription services - 601 links
- transcribe - 402 links
- gmr transcription - 335 links
- transcription company - 177 links
- digital transcription - 173 links
- www.gmrtranscription.com - 166 links
- audio transcription - 164 links
As mentioned already though, many of these are sitewide so you should be able to address the percentages fairly easily by contacting some of these sites and asking for the links to be changed.
-
I second what Maximise has said.
Going forward, start promoting your websites brand rather than its keywords. Concentrate on obtaining quality links with the anchor "GMR transctiption Services" or simply GMR transcription services.com
Have a look at your backlink profile and remove site wide links or atleast vary the anchor text were you can.
Your back link profile Ideally should be made up of about 70% branded terms, and 30% "money terms" otherwise it looks un natural to Google. (Generally speaking, its not an exact science)
Greg
-
Is your website www.gmrtranscription.com?
If yes then it's very possible you have been hit by one of the recent updates which target over optimised backlink profiles. You have over 800 links with the exact anchor text "transcription services", which your most linked term, many of these are also sitewide. These links do not look natural to search engines and I would recommend that you try and get them changed.
A natural link profile would mostly contain your brand name or url and then have a wide variety of other terms. I think you need to try to address this balance.
-
Hi webfeat,
The website is gmrtranscription.com(I am avoiding linking) and the keyword we are having trouble with is 'transcription services'.
-
Hard to tell without a link to your site to see what is going on.
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
-
Do you see sites with unfixable Penguin penalties?
Hello, We have a site with 2 Penguin update penalties (drops in traffic) and one quality penalty (another drop in traffic) all years ago, both just drops in rankings and not messages in Google Console. Now that Penguin is hard coded, do you find that some sites never recover even with a beautiful disavow and cleanup? We've added content and still have some quality errors, though I thought they were minor. This client used to have doorway sites and paid links, but now is squeaky clean with a disavow done a month ago though most of the cleanup was done by deletion of the doorways and paid links 9 months ago. Is this a quality problem or is our site permanently gone? Let me know what information you need. Looking for people with a lot of experience with other sites and Penguin. Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW2 -
Duplicate content - multiple sites hosted on same server with same IP address
We have three sites hosted on the same server with the same IP address. For SEO (to avoid duplicate content) reasons we need to redirect the IP address to the site - but there are three different sites. If we use the "rel canonical" code on the websites, these codes will be duplicates too, as the websites are mirrored versions of the sites with IP address, e.g. www.domainname.com/product-page and 23.34.45.99/product-page. What's the best ways to solve these duplicate content issues in this case? Many thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Jade0 -
Should I submit a sitemap for a site with dynamic pages?
I have a coupon website (http://couponeasy.com)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | shopperlocal_DM
Being a coupon website, my content is always keeps changing (as new coupons are added and expired deals are removed) automatically. I wish to create a sitemap but I realised that there is not much point in creating a sitemap for all pages as they will be removed sooner or later and/or are canonical. I have about 8-9 pages which are static and hence I can include them in sitemap. Now the question is.... If I create the sitemap for these 9 pages and submit it to google webmaster, will the google crawlers stop indexing other pages? NOTE: I need to create the sitemap for getting expanded sitelinks. http://couponeasy.com/0 -
Tags on WordPress Sites, Good or bad?
My main concern is about the entire tags strategy. The whole concept has really been first seen by myself on WordPress which seems to be bringing positive results to these sites and now there are even plugins that auto generate tags. Can someone detail more about the pros and cons of tags? I was under the impression that google does not want 1000's of pages auto generated just because of a simple tag keyword, and then show relevant content to that specific tag. Usually these are just like search results pages... how are tag pages beneficial? Is there something going on behind the scenes with wordpress tags that actually bring benefits to these wp blogs? Setting a custom coded tag feature on a custom site just seems to create numerous spammy pages. I understand these pages may be good from a user perspective, but what about from an SEO perspective and getting indexed and driving traffic... Indexed and driving traffic is my main concern here, so as a recap I'd like to understand the pros and cons about tags on wp vs custom coded sites, and the correct way to set these up for SEO purposes.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com1 -
Victim of Negative SEO - Can I Redirect the Attacked Page to an External Site?
My site has been a victim of Negative SEO. During the course of 3 weeks, I have received over 3000 new backlinks from 200 referring domains (based on Ahref report). All links are pointing to just 1 page (all other pages within the site are unaffected). I have already disavowed as many links as possible from Ahref report, but is that all I can do? What if I continue to receive bad backlinks? I'm thinking of permanently redirecting the affected page to an external website (a dummy site), and hope that all the juice from the bad backlinks will be transferred to that site. Do you think this would be a good practice? I don't care much about keeping the affected page on my site, but I want to make sure the bad backlinks don't affect the entire site. The bad backlinks started to come in around 3 weeks ago and the rankings haven't been affected yet. The backlinks are targeting one single keyword and are mostly comment backlinks and trackbacks. Would appreciate any suggestions 🙂 Howard
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | howardd0 -
Someone COPIED my entire site on Google- what should I do?
I purchased a very high ranked and old site a year or so ago. Now it appears that the people I purchased from completely copied the site all graphics and content. They have now built that site up high in rankings and I dont want it to compromise my site. These sites look like mirror images of each other What can I do?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TBKO0 -
Thinking of redirecting *all* mobile traffic to another site (via an advertiser) - safe to do?
Hi, I am thinking of redirecting all mobile (iphone, cell phone, etc) to an advertiser (so completely different content than my site). Is there any risk of getting banned from google (etc) for doing this? (this is for an adult site)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dmn020