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!
-
Done, thank you!
-
Yes, you'll need to remove it.
In WordPress, if you go to Settings > Reading, it's most likely that your developer has left the box checked that says "Discourage search engines from indexing this site".
Uncheck that box and you should be all good.
Cheers,
David
-
One other thing: should this tag be removed altogether? Thanks!
-
Holy cow, thank you!! I will do that ASAP. I had no idea that tag was in there, nor do I know how it got there! Thanks again.
-
David's right if your right click 'view page source' in chrome you will see:
This tag appears on every page of the site.
Remove the tag but also check the backlink profile and check you are not listed in a load of dodgy low DA directories. It may highlight any other issues you may have.
-
Nothing to do with a penalty. Nothing to do with negative SEO.
The problem here is that your site is noindexed...
Remove the meta robots noindex and I'd say you'll start to see your site ranking again.
Cheers,
David
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
-
Doorway page penalty
Has Google changed their interpretation of Doorway pages?We do not sell widgets but allow me to use Widget for this example;If we sold 25 very different widgets an online vendor would typically have 1 "mother" website with 25 different inner pages, each page to explain each type of widget they sell.However, for the past 9 years our approach is to have 25 different websites, one for each widget. With these 25 sites we concentrated on ranking the home page only . All these sites link back to our (No idexed) "Mother' site via no follow links where we have our Shopping Cart and Terms of Business. We did this partly to avoid having 25 separate Shopping Carts and to avoid having to change our Terms 25 times each time that became necessary. But yes we also did this as it was so much easier to rank each different type of widget in the SERPS. Also we think its a better user experience as in our business buyers of yellow widgets will not be interested in blue widgetsWe have been reading for years that google does not like doorways pages but we were not 100% certain if they might regard our sites as such .This is because our approach has worked great for nine years. That is until December last year when all 95% our sites fell dramatically in the SERPS usually from page 1 to page 2 or 3. First thing we did was to go through all our sites and search for the obvious; toxic links, duplicate content, keyword density, https issues, mobility issues, anchor text, etc etc and of course content. We found no obvious problems that could affect 95% of the sites at the same time but we ordered new homepage content for most of our sites from expert seo writers. However, after putting on this new content 3 -4 weeks ago our sites have not moved up the SERPS at all.So we are left with the inescapable conclusion that our problem is because google sees and devalues our sites as doorway pages especially as 95% of your sites have been affected all at the same time Would any SEO experts on this forum agree or be able to offer an opinion?If so, what might be the solution going forward? We have 2 solutions under consideration;1) Remove all links from each of our 25 sites to our "mother Site" and put a shopping cart and our TOS on each of the 25 sites so they are all truly independent stand alone websites.2) Create 25 inner pages on our mother site (after removing the no index) , for each of the 25 widgets we sell , then 301 each of the 25 individual sites home pages to its inner page on the mother site . I think this might be the best solution partly as almost all of our higher ranking competitors are ranking their inner pages not their homepage. But I worry if these 25 sites will really pass much link juice if they have been devalued by Google.?Any advice will be gratefully received.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | apcsilver90 -
Ecommerce Google Bias?
Does Google bias the type of content which ranks? HI Guys, If i wanted to create a nice blog post around a topic like: black dresses or yoga pants. If you view google.com or google.com.au results all the top ranking URLs are e-commerce pages which list the products. There is very rarely - blog content e.g. top black dresses to wear... or 7 of the hottest yoga pants on the market. The search intent is about the same i.e. someone looking for black dresses would be interested in that blog post. So in my conclusion Google has some form of bias in delivering ecommerce sites above blog/skyscrapper form of content. Thoughts? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | spyaccounts140 -
Recovery after recent Google update
Hi guys. This is somewhat a continuation for this topic: https://mza.seotoolninja.com/community/q/january-2016-massive-rankings-fluctuations After that update, several of our clients and our website as well have experienced high fluctuation rankings period, which ended up in huge drops - 10-20 spots. Which, obviously, made everyone unhappy. Anybody knows what exactly the change was about? What should we fix/take a look at, analyze again? We aren't using any shady techniques or black hat. Everything is honest. All metrics, number of backlinks etc are going up, no major changes have been recently made. Please, help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DmitriiK0 -
How to reverse declining Google rankings?
We have a long established business since 2004 and have been fortunate that having been one of the original companies in our industry, we have always enjoyed strong Google rankings. Unfortunately, these have been steadily declining over the past couple of years and a comparison of August to date against the equivalent period last year has seen a 20% drop in traffic from Google. We don't believe that it is being caused by a penalty and rather is the result of some strong players entering our market and tightening their focus which has caused us to take a dip in rankings. We are guilty of being complacent in our SEO - largely due to not knowing what to do and being scared to touch it when it was working in case we broke it! - but now it's time to fight back. We still have a strong site, good traffic levels and a strong product offering. We have knowledge of SEO and resources in house, but are not experts by any means. Our current plan is to: perform a technical site audit, fixing the issues highlighted by the Moz Pro Software put strong emphasis on our blog, writing daily about the latest news and events in our industry provide weekly content articles which are more in depth than the daily blog articles and which will be of interest to our community undertake surveys and publish infographics and statistics with the hope of being picked up in national newspapers Are there any key elements that we are missing out in this plan, or is that it in a nutshell? Any help and advice is greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | simonukss0 -
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 -
Will Google View Using Google Translate As Duplicate?
If I have a page in English, which exist on 100 other websites, we have a case where my website has duplicate content. What if I use Google Translate to translate the page from English to Japanese, as the only website doing this translation will my page get credit for producing original content? Or, will Google view my page as duplicate content, because Google can tell it is translated from an original English page, which runs on 100+ different websites, since Google Translate is Google's own software?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
Need your thoughts on my site
Hi, This is my site: http://hemorrhoidssuccess.com/ I have got some decent natural links with a mix of different anchor texts. My main keyword is "Hemorrhoids Treatment", And i got very less exact match anchor texts. Now i was able to rank for "Top Hemorrhoid Treatment" on #2 Page, but i was not in the index for the my main keyword "Hemorrhoids Treatment". Can you review my site and let me know, what i am missing? Do i need to get more links? If so with what anchor texts? Will be waiting for your replies.. Thanks in Advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vegitss
Dhee0 -
URL Error or Penguin Penalty?
I am currently having a major panic as our website www.uksoccershop.com has been largely dropped from Google. We have not made any changes recently and I am not sure why this is happening, but having heard all sorts of horror stories of penguin update, I am fearing the worst. If you google "uksoccershop" you will see that the homepage does not rank. We previously ranked in the top 3 for "football shirts" but now we don't, although on page 2, 3 and 4 you will see one of our category pages ranking (this didn't used to happen). Some rankings are intact, but many have disappeared completely and in some cases been replaced by other pages on our site. I should point out our existing rankings have been consistently there for 5-6 years until today. I logged into webmaster tools and thankfully there is no warning message from Google about spam, etc, but what we do have is 35,000 URL errors for pages which are accessible. An example of this is: | URL: | http://www.uksoccershop.com/categories/5_295_327.html | | Error details In Sitemaps Linked from Last crawled: 6/20/12First detected: 6/15/12Googlebot couldn't access the contents of this URL because the server had an internal error when trying to process the request. These errors tend to be with the server itself, not with the request. Is it possible this is the cause of the issue (we are not currently sure why the URL's are being blocked) and if so, how severe is it and how recoverable?If that is unlikely to cause the issue, what would you recommend our next move is?All help is REALLY REALLY appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ukss19840