How to tell if you have been penalised?
-
Hey Guys,
Something is seriously going on with the SEO on my website and it's become business critical.
We were ranked first on Google for phrases like 'Advertising agency Cambridge' and all of a sudden we have been dropped, not even ranking.
To me this screams a penalisation but I can't understand why. I have never paid for links or done anything out of the ordinary that would get such a negative impact.
Is there a way to check if a site has actually been penalised and find the reason?
What would be the best course of action to appeal?
Has anyone experienced something like this and have a timeframe for resolution?
Thanks,
Gareth
-
I see your homepage is back in the index in Google when I do a site: search, and in google.com it's showing up on the first page for a search of Advertising agency Cambridge from California.
Did you figure out what happened and why you got back in? Or just celebrating that the page is including again? Glad to see it's back in there!
-
Hi,
Yep its all verified, sitemap was all in place, no crawling errors, 301 redirects in place.
Talk about pulling your hair out, how can Google just drop the homepage without any prior warning or error.
Ugh
-
Have you verified your site in Google Webmaster Tools? Google will send you a warning there sometimes if they see something really bad.
-
Very strange.. I find it incredibly bizzare as I haven't done any major SEO work and as you say, it just happened that over the weekend the homepage went.
Perhaps a Google bug or a major reshuffle? I am just struggling to come up with an answer.
-
this is weird. Same thing happened to us (homepage gone, rest ok) over the weekend and I've just seen another thread to the same effect.
Interesting to see how this pans out. Hopefully a temporary rumble
-
Hey,
I see you have a Wordpress Site so your "Home Page" could be called anything. What are you expecting to see as your home page?
Just the domain name I guess.
Of course the actual page you are looking for may be indexed in another name. Maybe take a look at how is your home page created.
Not that helpful. sorry...
-
i have sen this before, it has always come back.
-
Checking site index, everypage is present except for the homepage.
I have never done anything black hat so I am incredibly confused as to why it's been dropped from the index and what I can do to get it reindexed.
Cheers
-
What is the URL of the Home page? Are you certain it's been removed from the index?
try searching in Google for SITE:http://www.YOURHOMEPAGE.com/INDEX-NAME.HTML
Steve
-
After further investigation, it appears to just be the homepage that has been removed.
All other pages are still visible in search results, can anyone help shed some light on this situation with their experience?
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
-
Old site penalised, we moved: Shall we cut loose from the old site. It's curently 301 to new site.
Hi, We had a site with many bad links pointing to it (.co.uk). It was knocked from the SERPS. We tried to manually ask webmasters to remove links.Then submitted a Disavow and a recon request. We have since moved the site to a new URL (.com) about a year ago. As the company needed it's customer to find them still. We 301 redirected the .co.uk to the .com There are still lots of bad links pointing to the .co.uk. The questions are: #1 Do we stop the 301 redirect from .co.uk to .com now? The .co.uk is not showing in the rankings. We could have a basic holding page on the .co.uk with 'we have moved' (No link). Or just switch it off. #2 If we keep the .co.uk 301 to the .com, shall we upload disavow to .com webmasters tools or .co.uk webmasters tools. I ask this because someone else had uploaded the .co.uk's disavow list of spam links to the .com webmasters tools. Is this bad? Thanks in advance for any advise or insight!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SolveWebMedia0 -
Can I tell Google to Ignore Parts of a Page?
Hi all, I was wondering if there was some sort of html trick that I could use to selectively tell a search engine to ignore texts on certain parts of a page. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Charles_Murdock
Charles0 -
How can I tell where I was penalised?
It seems for sometime now I have not been showing up the top for my keywords when I use to be ranking #1 and #2 for my main keywords, however now, I don't show up anywhere - this has been for almost a year now, can anyone tell me how I can find out (apart from google web masters tools) where I was penalised? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edward-may0 -
How to tell the date a link was created
Does anybody know of a website that can let you know when an external link was created to a site? Or any other way of finding this info out. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobSchofield0 -
Does Google throttle back the search performance of a penalised website/page after the penalty has been removed?
Hi Mozzers. Back in 2013 my website www.octopus-hr.co.uk was hit by a Penguin 2.0 penalty owing to a harmful backlink profile built by a dodgy SEO consultant (now fired). The penalty seemed to apply to the homepage of the site but other pages were unaffected. We got what links we could removed, disavowed the rest and were informed in September 2013 that the penalty had been removed and our re-inclusion request had been successful. However our website homepage still ranks poorly for the search terms we're targeting in the UK: "HR Software" "HR Systems" On page factors are in my opinion pretty well optimised for these search terms. In terms of link building post penalty we've focused on high authority and relevant sites. I believe that compared to most of our search competitors the back link profile to our homepage is in pretty good shape, however it still ranks badly. Has anyone had any experience of a penalty hangover from Google in the past? Are there other things I should consider? Thanks David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OctopusHR0 -
How Can Google tell, if a anchor text is exact match
So, I was thinking to myself today. Couldn't Google say everything is an exact match anchor text in reality? Such as, Hyundai in Boston, Or cars in boston? I'm just concerned, that's all. Thanks for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeterRota0 -
How can I tell which website pages are hosted on the root domain vs the www subdomain?
One of the SEOmoz help desk professionals told me this today regarding some of my website pages. "it looks like you have pages hosted as separate pages on both the root domain and the www subdomain, which means that these pages are competing for rankings and authority. You may want to consider a 301 redirect or the use of rel=canonical tags.". Can anyone help me understand this? How can I tell which pages are which?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webestate0 -
Nobody Can Answer This? What Can Google Tell About Videos?
I uploaded a video to youtube one time and then went to upload it again, but saved differently with different tags. Youtube rejected the second upload as being the same as the first. Really, it was the same... just a different file with different tags. Now, I was thinking about making and uploading some similar but not identical videos for embedding on some web pages. Was thinking I'd make the voice overs different, but the images mostly the same montage. Do you think Youtube/Google will see it as the same video? I kind of assume that it didn't fly when I first tried it some time ago because youtube was looking at the audio in the way it can make a transcription. Do you think if the audi,o, file name, tags were different, it wouldn't matter if the video was the same? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010