Would this drop indicate a manual penalty?
-
Website short link: f c w . i m (copy and remove the spaces)
A few weeks ago now we dropped from around page 2 all the way to around page 14 for they keyword watches on Google UK. We have remained around the level of page 12-17 ever since.
Other important keywords which we monitor have slowly moved from page 1 positions onto page 2 or the bottom of page 1. Of course this is really worrying us as we are an e-commerce website and we are in peak season.
Natural suspects would be duplicate content issues, crawl issues or bad links. All of which we have looked into and spent the past month improving to the best of our ability.
I have gone through almost all of the content on the website. We have our own written descriptions on our 5000 products and have identified a small amount with issues using Copyscape. We have lots of unique customer product reviews and we have our own unique blog.
I have looked into Crawl Issues and fine tuned URL parameter settings, usage of canonical and added next and prev tags. All of the faceted navigation which shouldn't be indexed has been excluded through canonical for well over a month and again recently using URL parameters in WT.
Our link profile is small and doesn't contain a lot of spam links - we have identified some and wish to get them removed but even so I don't think the small quantity of links (a lot of which are nofollow also) would justify dropping us over around 100 places for a clearly relevant keyword.
The only other thing that might be an issue is a large number of on page links. This is partly due to drop down page navigation. All our pages are being indexed by Google though so I'm not sure if it is a problem. You could argue it dilutes page rank, but you would think Google's algorithms would take recurring page navigation into account somehow - removing it would probably be detrimental to our users.
So really we wanted to see if any SEO experts could help me out with this. It seems to us that it is either something we have already identified (causing a lot more impact than we would expect following the latest Google updates) or something else. Maybe a manual penalty?
Thanks if you read the whole thing! Didn't intend to write this much really!
-
Hey Ryan havent heard anything yet.
Have you had a chance to investigate further?
Thanks
-
Great, I look forward to hearing your response and proposed strategy.
The drop for watches was the first major indication that we had a problem and it was before the October Penguin update. Seems to be more likely looking at Analytics that it was late September.
Ever since then it seems are rankings have been going slowly backwards. Regardless, we need a new SEO strategy ASAP.
Thanks
-
**We have filed a reconsideration request but are worried they will look at our link - like responders have - and consider them low quality and then penalise us more. **
It is theoretically possible but highly unlikely. My best presumption is a basic "has my site been penalized" type of Reconsideration Request would be handled by a junior member of the Spam Team who would simply respond as to whether manual action has been taken on the site or not. Matt Cutts previously shared when the Spam Team receives a Reconsideration Request, they do not go looking for additional violations but if something obvious is discovered during their normal investigation, they may take action.
-
Hi Scott,
You hit the key points with your analysis. You mentioned a "slight drop" around the time of the September Panda update. Site traffic fluctuates normally so I would not normally be concerned with a slight drop.
You also mentioned a "plummet" for the keyword watches which is a different matter. Does that plummet coincide with a major update such as Panda?
I have received your email and will respond shortly. We would be glad to assist.
-
Well looking at the dates I have found it to be around the time of the overlapping Panda and EMD updates. I didn't originally suspect our link profile instead some sort of duplicate content issue. So I've gone through all of that - canonical, next prev, parameters, sitemaps, no index on generic forms, Copyscape on a whole bunch of pages (some still to fix but I would put us at 95% unique), new blog posts and improved product titles.
But a month later no real change. Do you think Google is still processing my updates (maybe some of the canonical stuff which is faceted navigation related)? How would I determine if I need to start removing links?
We have filed a reconsideration request but are worried they will look at our link - like responders have - and consider them low quality and then penalise us more.
Let me know what you think.
-
I would highly suggest that before you go removing links you find out what the problem actually is. I have seen a number of webmasters who have removed a large amount of links only to find out eventually that their site was hit by Panda. You mentioned you may have had duplicate content issues and that would be a Panda issue. Removing links could do more harm in this case.
You've gotten some great advice in this thread. File for reconsideration to see if there is a manual penalty. A quick look at your backlinks doesn't make me think Penguin. However, you've got a number of sites redirected to yours so if any of them have a Penguin issue then you would have transferred it.
Have a good look at your analytics, sorted by organic search traffic and see if you can determine if the drop happened on a known Panda date or on a Penguin date and that will hopefully help you figure things out a little better.
-
We have examined our Analytics already and it would seem to indicate a slight drop in Google traffic that coincides with the Exact Match Domain and Panda updates that ran at the end of September. This is when we first noticed our plummet for the keyword watches.
It seems to be almost exclusive to Google organic traffic. We rank reasonably well in Bing/Yahoo. Other channels like CPC are of course not showing any issues.
It seems to have affected some keywords more than others but it feels like the authority of the domain is slowly being reduced in Google's eyes. We still rank for more specific stuff and they are still indexing us.
I have made a general response further down that you might be interested in.
We are actually looking to partner with an SEO company that can improve our rankings. Is this something Vitopian SEO would be interested in?
-
It would seem the general consensus of responses focusses on our link profile.
While I will hold my hands up and say there are some questionable links in there I'm not sure what to do about some of them. We haven't actively "built" links for quite some time as the results look unnatural and it would be dangerous to do so. I can contact webmasters where possible and ask them to remove links but where do I draw the line?
Any overly commercial anchor text is probably a given. Do I also go after really old directory links, years old in some cases? Should I go after websites that are crawling the web and linking back to us (probably not?). There seems to be a little bit of automated stuff in there which isn't down to us.
Should I disavow any comment spam in the profile or stuff which looks bad? The thing is, nobody here will own up to doing it and it and they have all appeared in Aug 2011 - so it could be a rogue contractor or I wouldn't put it past a competitor (they've resorted to DDoS in the past, so negative SEO isn't out of their league). If I disavow these links would it be seen as admitting to being a spammer? I don't want Google to single us out any further.
Or would my time be better spent trying to get more links? Problem is, we've already been trying to get natural links for 8 years. There are companies which will charge us thousands to make infographics and "great content" but there's no guarantee of it working for us.
In the case of Wikipedia - I can't think of many reasons why someone would put a link up to http://www.wikipedia.org with that as the anchor text or something similar, unless the way there are posting the link doesn't allow them to change the anchor text. It is probably the case of automated links throughout the web as they are such a massive website.
I think people would be even less likely to do a link like that to our website, we do have the majority of our link going to our brand name though.
-
Hey Jamie
I just took a quick look at the back link profile and it could be a case study for a penguin style anchor text.
Where are the natural links? Where are the branded URL links? It is just so keyword heavy in the anchors that there is no way in the world that it is natural.
Take a look at your backlink profile:
http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?site=www.firstclasswatches.co.uk
Then compare that to something totally organic like say, wikipedia:
http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?site=www.wikipedia.org
Now, that is an extreme example, but that is the point. You represent one end of a spectrum with just artifical, anchort text driven links and wikipedia represents the other end with natural editorial links.
Wikipedia has like the top 20 as URL variations, you have the top 20 as keyword variations.
I did a bit of an analysis of the various penguin analysis's out there and tried to come up with some basic rules for anchor text and yours is certainly a mess. The following is probably worth a read (to save me a bit of typing here):
http://www.bowlerhat.co.uk/blog/seo/anchor-text-ratios-and-link-building/
This is a five minute analysis but I would pretty much hang my hat on some kind of link penalty or devaluation so it's time to clean house!
Hope this helps
Marcus
-
If you haven't been de-indexed then you really can't file a re-inclusion request because you haven't technically been "excluded."
Google uses the term "Reconsideration Request" whereas Bing uses the term "Reinclusion Request". Can you clarify which search engine you are having troubles with?
Bing is much more selective then Google with respect to the pages they index, and it is not uncommon for them to remove a "bad" site from their index, hence their choice of the term "reinclusion".
Google typically does not remove a site from their index but rather lowers the ranking which has the same affect in terms of the traffic drop. When you file a Reconsideration Request you are literally asking Google to reconsider how they choose to index your site.
Concerning Google, if you suspect manual action might have been taken, you certainly can file a Reconsideration Request. In my experience, Google quickly responds and will inform you if any manual action has been taken on the site.
Shortly after submitting a Reconsideration Request, you should receive the following response:
We've received a request from a site owner to reconsider how we index the following site: http://www.XXXXXX.com/
We'll review the site. If we find that it's no longer in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines, we'll reconsider our indexing of the site. Please allow several weeks for the reconsideration request. We do review all requests, but unfortunately we can't reply individually to each request.
After a period of time, Google will respond either notifying you of a penalty or stating a manual penalty does not exist. In my experience, this response presently comes in about a week. I have heard reports from others they have not received a response or it has taken much longer. I can only share my agency works with a lot of penalties and this is my experience. Below is an example of a response I received for a client on November 1st.
Dear site owner or webmaster of http://XXXXXX.com/,
We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://XXXXXX.com/ for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team.
Of course, there may be other issues with your site that affect your site's ranking. Google's computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users.
If you've experienced a change in ranking which you suspect may be more than a simple algorithm change, there are other things you may want to investigate as possible causes, such as a major change to your site's content, content management system, or server architecture. For example, a site may not rank well if your server stops serving pages to Googlebot, or if you've changed the URLs for a large portion of your site's pages. This article has a list of other potential reasons your site may not be doing well in search.
If you're still unable to resolve your issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team
-
Hi Jamie and Ryan,
Jamies, you said "Our link profile is small" - How small is small? If it's small and your only links are somewhat questionable, then, okay maybe I can understand. However, my gut says that's not it.
Ryan, you say that you can find out if you were manually penalized by Google by submitting a reconsideration request. My experience with Google does not play that out. If you haven't been de-indexed then you really can't file a re-inclusion request because you haven't technically been "excluded."
Okay, all that being said, and we are in the same spot as James. We have been in business for over 40 years, do #RCS and our Website has been online since 1996. Last week we had a number of keywords we had ranking between pages 2 and 3 of Google (We had many more on page one but I'm not going to talk about those).
Following up on a suggestion that was made by Fabio Riccota at MozCon2012, I decided it would be a good idea to isoiate keywords ranking on Page 2 and target those for improvement to get to page 1. I decided, before embarking on any campaigns, I'd check the current rank of those 30-40 keywords prior to trying to optimize the site and move them up toe page one.
What happened next shocked me.
I loaded them in my Firefox RankChecker tool only to discover that all but 4-5 of 50 keywords had dropped out of the top 200 SERPS.
What's even more discouraging is that this is after we fixed a big problem with a meta refresh on our home page, addressed all of our 404 errors and also worked through every single duplicate content issues identified in GWT.
James, I am with you. It looks like we have both dotted our i's and crossed out t's...what are we supposed to do now? What is it we haven't done????
Dana
-
Ryan is pretty much right on his point... I spent 2mins on your link profile data and I can say that this more seems like a link penalty. The links pointing to you are mostly spammy and irrelevant.
I think its better to check your messages in Google Webmaster tool and see if you received any email from Google.
In other case there are two things you can do:
- Design a viral link campaign that allows natural links to come in, focus on the link quality and relevancy.
- Use Link Disavow tool by Google to discount shitty links that are available in your profile.
And this should help you increase your rankings within few weeks of time.
Hope this helps~
-
You could be impacted by manual action from Google's spam team (i.e. a manual penalty), a named algorithm update such as Penguin, Panda, etc. or one of the 50 other algorithm updates Google makes each month.
The easiest way to tell if your site has been manually penalized is to ask Google (i.e. file a Reconsideration Request). Google will tell you if they have taken manual action on the site.
There are numerous other steps you can take to help diagnose why the drop in traffic occurred:
-
examine your Google Analytics data to see on what date the traffic dropped
-
drill down further to confirm what source(s) were involved. Did the traffic drop across the board? Or just for Google organic search?
-
how did the drop happen? Did it only affect specific keywords or pages?
The above information is of key importance. I would share your backlink profile is very spammy. It would take further investigation to confirm but there is a significant chance you are impacted by a manual penalty for manipulative links or a Penguin update.
-
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
-
Penalty for duplicate content on the same website?
Is it possible to get a penalty for duplicate content on the same website? I have a old custom-built site with a large number of filters that are pre-generated for speed. Basically the only difference is the meta title and H1 tag, with a few text differences here and there. Obviously I could no-follow all the filter links but it would take an enormous amount of work. The site is performing well in the search. I'm trying to decide whether if there is a risk of a penalty, if not I'm loath to do anything in case it causes other issues.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
I'm noticing that URL that were once indexed by Google are suddenly getting dropped without any error messages in Webmasters Tools, has anyone seen issues like this before?
I'm noticing that URLs that were once indexed by Google are suddenly getting dropped without any error messages in Webmasters Tools, has anyone seen issues like this before? Here's an example:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nystromandy
http://www.thefader.com/2017/01/11/the-carter-documentary-lil-wayne-black-lives-matter0 -
HELP!!! Steep Drop in Organic Traffic Starting 11/1/16
Starting November 1st, organic web traffic from Google dropped from an average of about 60 visits a day to about 5 per day. So we are more than 90% off!!!! At the end of September, we modified the header of the site to simplify it. We also added a snippet of code to each page to enable Zoho "Sales IQ" to work. Sales IQ enables us to track visitors and engage in chat sessions with them. Apart from that no changes have been made from the site. Any ideas as to what could have caused this drop in traffic? Was there a Google update at that time that could have caused the drop? Or could the recent site changes have caused this? I have attached a Google Webmasters Tool report showing the drop in traffic. I would very much appreciate some insight into this, as all organic traffic to our site has ceased. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan 9VNB1O50 -
Big drop in bounce rate suddenly
Our site had a huge drop in bounce rate in one day (went from 10% to 3%) and it has stayed that way. What could cause this? P4bYpNF.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | navidash0 -
Puzzling drop in search referrals.
Hello All, A few weeks ago I posted in the Q and A believing I had received a google penalty due to a sudden and considerable drop in referrals... http://www.seomoz.org/q/google-penalty-8 ... so I dug right to the bottom of my site and did a complete review of all my links. After clearing all the potentially problematic links, I wrote a very descriptive reconsideration request to google. 10 days or so later I received a 'no manual spam action found' response, which I guess is a good thing but now begs the question- what has gone wrong!? Over the past 4 or 5 months I've been doing some heavy work on the SEO of my site, www.madegood.org. This has all been white hat stuff (as far as I'm aware), and have been using my seomoz pro account to monitor progress. I've done lots of reading on the subject so think I'm up to scratch on most general good advice, in terms of link building and site structure. I've always tried to create very high quality content and have been building some great links from very authoritative sites including The Guardian newspaper and Sheffield University. My pro dashboard is telling me that my link analysis history is improving, despite my keyword performance declining. Is there anyone that can do a deep review of my site? I'm happy to share my analytics/webmaster tools etc info with you if that is helpful? I'm totally lost here and am becoming disheartened with all the hard work I've been putting into the SEO for my site. Thanks so much in advance, any help is gratefully received. Of course I can provide more info should you need it. Will
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | madegood0 -
Webmaster Index Page significant drop
Has anyone noticed a significant drop in indexed pages within their Google Webmaster Tools sitemap area? We went from 1300 to 83 from Friday June 23 to today June 25, 2012 and no errors are showing or warnings. Please let me know if anyone else is experiencing this and suggestions to fix this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | datadirect0 -
SERP Drop overnight for one of our domains - could it be the title changes?
Hi Scratching our heads here over SERP drop for some of our product pages, Although they are all uniquely titled with the product name, we have recently added 4 words at the end of our title, like a slogan which are repeated on every one of our product pages. However, we've also seen a drop, but not as far, on related category pages, these have unique titles. When we talk about "unique title" being important for SEO, does that mean 0 reptition between page titles? I see many companies use their site name in the title (even here see | SEOMOZ Q&A - would four words at the end of a title do this? Or am i barking up the wrong tree entirely? Ive seen so much movement over the past few weeks its hard to correlate anything we do with the result, so even after advise I think i'll wait a week
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | xoffie0 -
Penalties for site going down often?
I have a client with a site that ranks for some very competitive terms who consistently has server issues and the site goes down for a day at a time. Each time this happens his site seems to drop in site wide rankings and then stay there for months without ever fully recovering. Only part of the rankings are usually recovered. Has anyone else seen this trend? Is it something Google keeps on record without fully removing any penalty addressed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iAnalyst.com0