How to ask for forgiveness from the Google God?
-
Ok so maybe not ask for "forgiveness" because I am not sure what we did to get penalized.
I believe our site is being penalized 1. most of our usual keywords are not ranked in their usual placements in the search results. 2. some of our keywords are listing the wrong pages as search results and 3. our search results are landing on pages 8 or 9 on Google (not 2 or 3 as before).
This is an ecommerce site. How do we figure out what trigger the penalty (if at all) and how do we fix it so that we can get our ranking back (is that even possible)?
Please advise - much help is needed!
-
I thought there's no such thing as duplicate content on site penalty? We have products that have"sample" products. The sample product does have the sample content as it's parent product. But we have had this for years. Will message you. Thank you.
-
Hey Mof3kz,
In my experience, a sudden drop like this is most likely an indication of a content problem on the site itself. The fact that you mention that this is an ecommerce site only furthers this opinion and if you are using the default, manufacturers product descriptions for your content then you could have been slightly filtered due to weak or duplicate content.
If you would like to post a URL I would be happy to take a look for you as I have some experience here, alternatively, you can message me the URL if it is sensitive.
I would suggest reading this post from Dr. Pete before you do anything else:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/fat-pandas-and-thin-content
You can also check the likelihood of content problems with the copyscape plagiarism tool:
Copyscape will show you pages on your site that similar to pages on other sites and it ranks them by likelihood to be causing a problem so again, it can be more evidence that you have been flagged as a weak result and are being buried in the deep, dark result pages.
With anything like this, it's hard to be completely sure and at best you can only be fairly confident about certain things. The job here is to identify any and all problems that MAY be causing the issue and start to work on the problems. From experience, content is often the best place to start so I sincerely hope this helps.
Post a link though, happy to take a look as I am sure many others here are two (with many eyes, you will get much valuable feedback).
Hope this helps!
Marcus
P.S. If you have a content type problem, there is no need to 'ask' for forgiveness, just get rid of the problems and the great and merciful google will cast down a blessing!
-
Hi Mof3kz,
Whenever I had to deal with a similar situation to yours I was always checking what we have done, what did change in the past few weeks.
Even, if you have been working with some great link partners, take your time and write an email. Ask them if they have experienced a fluctuation lately in the search engines on their ranking.
Possible situations:
1. The major link partners have experienced big fluctuations, maybe their links profile had a bigger change and since you are connected it will in some way effect you too.
2. They didn't experience any fluctuations: this is when you ask yourself, ok, then what the hell happened here? Stay chill! try to get on-site ask yourself if you are optimizing the right way. Try to avoid any possible issue from your site, add better content if possible, check for crawlability, etc. etc.
3. The link partners tell you they have experienced some kind of fluctuations, but not big ones. Now this part is tricky. As we all know, search engines like Google are constantly changing the algorithms, trying out new filters to show up the most relevant content. Some filter (new or existing one) has triggered out your possible loss. It might be temporary, it might be something stable. In these cases I usually advice the same thing as @ the point 2.
I hope this resolves your situation! Good luck!
Gr.,
Istvan
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
-
Google Does not find Internal links
Hi guys I involved in difficult situation. in google webmaster tools -> internal links some important pages doesn't have any links from all pages. for example home page just have 9000 internal inks but there are 29000 indexed pages by google and some not important pages have 27000 internal links.(more than home page) Site made by angular v1 Is there anyone can help me why google could not find all internal links?
Technical SEO | | cafegardesh0 -
What to do when Google automatically replaces the page title.
Hello Friends, Might you all are aware of the scenario when Google auto generates the snippets for search results. But nowadays I am seeing some changes like google is showing some specific words in the last of search results title for every page of my website. It looks Google is treating those words as the brand name. I have tried many things to solve this but unfortunately, nothing works for this. Does anyone see the same changes? Can anybody help me out with this or suggest me the reasons behind this.
Technical SEO | | Shalusingh1 -
Google Crawling Issues! How Can I Get Google to Crawl My Website Regularly?
Hi Everyone! My website is not being crawled regularly by Google - there are weeks when it's regular but for the past month or so it does not get crawled for seven to eight days. There are some specific pages, that I want to get ranked but they of late are not being crawled AT ALL unless I use the 'Fetch As Google' tool! That's not normal, right? I have checked and re-checked the on-page metrics for these pages (and the website as a whole, backlinking is a regular and ongoing process as well! Sitemap is in place too! Resubmitted it once too! This issue is detrimental to website traffic and rankings! Would really appreciate insights from you guys! Thanks a lot!
Technical SEO | | farhanm1 -
Google Analytics and Adwords Linkup
I'm in the middle of a log jam with linking google analytics to google adwords. I have a client whose account lists properties for five distinct websites. Company A www.website1.com/
Technical SEO | | OOMDODigital
www.website2.com/
www.website3.com/ There are individual adwords accounts for each property that I'm trying to link up. Here's the issue I"m having. I can link up Website1.com Analytics to Website1.com Adwords. Then I'll link up Website2.com Analyitics to Website2.com Adwords. This will cause Website1.com to be linked up to Website2.com's Adwords. How do I fix this?0 -
Ranking on google.com.au but not google.com
Hi there, we (www.refundfx.com.au) rank on google.com.au for some keywords that we target, but we do not rank at all on google.com, is that because we only use a .com.au domain and not a .com domain? We are an Australian company but our customers come from all over the world so we don't want to miss out on the google.com searches. Any help in this regard is appreciated. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | RefundFX0 -
Remove Site from Google
How can I get my website out of google? I want all pages completely gone. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | tylerfraser0 -
Google plus
With Google search plus your world, would i see results ONLY from Google plus followers ? or from someone who is my facebook friend as well.
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Google & Separators
This is not a question but something to share. If you click on all of these links and compare the results you will see why _ is not a good thing to have in your URLs. http://www.google.com/search?q=blue http://www.google.com/search?q=b.l.u.e http://www.google.com/search?q=b-l-u-e http://www.google.com/search?q=b_l_u_e http://www.google.com/search?q=b%20l%20u%20e If you have any other examples of working separators please comment.
Technical SEO | | Dan-Petrovic3