Have I been penalised?
-
I recently set up a site (3 months ago). After a couple of months I was on page 1/2/3 for all my main keywords. However on friday all the keywords except for 3 dropped out of the SERPS. Today only 1 keyword remains in the SERPS!
I'm an amatuer SEO and remember with my 1st site I worked on (this new one is only my second) that it occassionally dissapeared from the SERPS for a few days and came back. It's now been 4 days though and I'm beginning to think I may have been penaslised.
This second site is more of an affiliate site but I do try to include lots of relevant unique content even so. Could it be because it's an affiliate site? All the affiliate links are no follow.
-
Just because you buddy did not get caught speeding does not mean you won't.
Duplicate content doesn't help anyone.
Neither does forum signatures.
My question would be how many links did you gain in what about of time?
100+ in one week/month/year?
Did you add links slowly or just gain them all in one week?
If you just put up a site & all the sudden have hundreds of links to it... you might have been busted for unnatural linking...
-
No messages in webmaster tools.Do google always inform you? All the pages are still in the google index if I enter site:thenmyurl. It's just not showing in the top 100. In terms of link building I've posted in directories, used forum signatures, some reciprocal linking and I have set up blogs on high authority domains and posted content on them however I did post some of the same content on several blogs with links pointing to my site so that could look unnatural. The reason I did this though was I noticed a competitor that was ranking in the top 10 had used that strategy. It seems odd if I have been penalised because of that as they are still in the top 10.
-
It's a bad sign if your site is nowhere to be found in the Google rankings. Are you sites still able to be found in Google? Or did the rankings just drop below the 3rd page?
Did you engage in any backlinking or other tactics that Google does not approve of? Are you registered with Google Webmaster tools? If yes, have you checked for any messages there?
-
your going to need to give a little more info about your tactics, link building, etc.
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
-
Links from a penalised site.
Hey Mozzers, Recently we have had a series of agencies in to pitch for work, one group mentioned that due to our association with a possibly penalised product review website, any links and activity associated with the brand would hinder our SEO. We currently have a good rating, but we are now no longer pushing our customers to the site as we move to a new platform. The current link back from this website is also no-followed. Any thoughts on how this could impact us? And how the agencies determined the site was penalised and causing us problems. Cheers Tim
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TimHolmes0 -
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 -
Is it ok to 301 redirect this previously algorithmicly penalised site?
Hi All, Is it OK to 301 redirect site A to site B? Site A: http://goo.gl/P9Zp2y Site B: http://goo.gl/ySDCzb The story - in 2013 site a seemed to be penalised with some kind of anchor text algorithm penalty - SEO couldnt fix, so created site B and turned site A into a holding page with a no follow link to new site. SEO company worked on disavow file etc, implemented in late 2013 301 redirect site A to B in late 2013 - SEO advised to stop 301 about 8 weeks later... This was my fault i didnt realise the implications of a redirect... Stopped the redirect, but too late, as site B dropped in rankings in early 2014 - new disavow files uploaded to both sites, but damage seems done now. No longer have a SEO company, and i would ideally like to 301 redirect site A to B, as it looks messy having a holding page - but wanted to check if SEO would still strongly advise against that? please advise James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | isntworkdull0 -
What happens if one remove the disavow file from a non penalised site
What happens if one remove the disavow file from a site that has not received a manual penalty from Google. Although the site did suffer from a drop in traffic and rankings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Taiger0 -
Forum being heavily penalised
Hi everyone, I've just signed up for Moz and I'm getting well and truly stuck in. I have just completed my first site crawl and have a frightening 5,363 errors and 25,319 warnings. The main culprit is the forum on my site, it contains hundreds of pages dating from as far back as 2002. It is full of Duplicate Content, Duplicate page titles and a fair few 404 errors where old links are now outdated. Can anyone advise what would be the best course of action? Should I hide the whole forum from Google's robots? My only concern with doing this is the loss of hundreds of pages of regularly updated content which I feel is boosting SEO. Help! Thanks guys 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gaz33420 -
Question on starting again after being penalised for bad links
Hi, in a scenario where you have been heavily penalised for bad links but the quality of your site is good, If you put the exact same version of your penalised site on a new domain (with no redirects), would Google recognise it and penalise it again, or would that give it a completely fresh start? Any advice or experience with this would be much appreciated. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | em_welsby1 -
Suggestions for a cost effective, SEO safe domain that was previously penalised
Hi, I will try to explain my situation as clearly as I can, and any positive advise would be greatly appreciated. Obviously please let me know if you have any questions but I'm sorry the domains are private. I started by business 4 years ago and launched a website (site A) and worked hard to promote it in the best way I knew how. It brought in a good income for around 3 years but then was hit with some sort of google penalty/filter! Knowing then what I know now would probably of avoided the problem altogether but that's another story... So I brought another domain (site B) and started again with a new design and completely re-branded the company, and again have been working hard to promote it. It has been preforming well and there has been steady progress 😉 However since then I have been steadily promoting the penalised site (site A) and keeping an eye on it to see if the penalty/filter may be lifted. It had initially lost around 75% of traffic, but recently has been doing much better in SERPS and is again on the increase. My problem is that with my company now being completely re branded I want to keep consistency but (site A) looks old and dated compared the new one (site B) and I don’t want to be confusing users etc... So I need a cost efficient and “safe” solution to this in terms of SEO and budget. 301 Redirect to site B I thought of a 301 redirect “BUT” I'm concerned about the penalty/filter being passed onto the new site (site B) and have read this dose happen ? Complete Redesign/brand for site A This would probably be the best option except I'm limited on funds. I would need “another” full commerce site as its just way to much money at the moment. Remove site A completely Funds are tight and I'm still feeling the affects of the penalty so really can't afford to loose any traffic at all! Use site A as a micro-site I thought a micro site with just the main product landing pages being used. I would use the same design as site B, then re-write the text and then link everything to the new site. “BUT” I'm concerned about getting another penalty (duplicate) as all the anchor text links going to site B site would be identical! EG. To use the same design as site B I would need to use the same layout etc including navbars, anchor text links in the footer etc.. and I'm worried this may trigger a duplicate content penalty ? I hope there are some suggestion for my situation and thanks in advance for your help. Thanks Chris.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | doorguy880 -
How can I penalise my own site in an international search?
Perhaps penalise isn't the right word, but we have two ecommerce sites. One at .com and one at .com.au. For the com.au site we would like only that site to appear for our brand name search in google.com.au. For the .com site we would like only that site to appear for our brand name search in google.com. I've targeted each site in the respective country in Google Webmaster Tools and published the Australian and English address on the respective site. What I'm concerned about is people on Google.com.au searching our brand and clicking through to the .com site. Is there anything I can do to lower the ranking of my .com site in Google.com.au?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Benj250