So What On My Site Is Breaking The Google Guidelines?
-
I have a site that I'm trying to rank for the Keyword "Jigsaw Puzzles"
I was originally ranked around #60 or something around there and then all of a sudden my site stopped ranking for that keyword. (My other keyword rankings stayed)
Contacted Google via the site reconsideration and got the general response...
So I went through and deleted as many links as I could find that I thought Google may not have liked... heck, I even removed links that I don't think I should have JUST so I could have this fixed.
I responded with a list of all links I removed and also any links that I've tried to remove, but couldn't for whatever reasons.
They are STILL saying my website is breaking the Google guidelines... mainly around links.
Can anyone take a peek at my site and see if there's anything on the site that may be breaking the guidelines? (because I can't)
Website in question: http://www.yourjigsawpuzzles.co.uk
UPDATE:
Just to let everyone know that after multiple reconsideration requests, this penalty has been removed.
They stated it was a manual penalty.
I tried removing numerous different types of links but they kept saying no, it's still breaking rules.
It wasn't until I removed some website directory links that they removed this manual penalty.
Thought it would be interesting for some of you guys.
-
Great new Rhys!
-
Just to let everyone know that after multiple reconsideration requests, this penalty has been removed.
They stated it was a manual penalty.
I tried removing numerous different types of links but they kept saying no, it's still breaking rules.
It wasn't until I removed some website directory links that they removed this manual penalty.
Thought it would be interesting for some of you guys.
-
Potentially quicker to rank well if you built back up on a fresh domain with no poor history, but that being said, whose not to know if Google have methods in place to identify if domain owners do this - potentially via comparing content, code and copy. You might end up redoing everything on your website just to be safe.
Sticking with the same domain just means that you have to build a relatively significant amount of natural links to bring down the same anchor text ratio vs total external backlinks in the profile - do-able though if you subscribe to a few blogs and regularly comment to articles and maybe write some content for publication at toy (or other related) blogs - ensuring that you avoid blog rings/link networks/farms though.
-
In a situation like list, on a fairly new domain would it be quicker to start from scratch on a new domain?
-
View your link profile here.
Links are mostly coming from unauthoritative sources and mostly contain the same anchor text. This will be what you have to work on, start building natural links with varying anchor text to counterweight the poor link profile and history on your domain.
-
Sounds like you are an excellent candidate for some fun Memes attempting to gain socical traction!
-
Hi Rhys,
I agree with everything that Alan stated regarding existing links.
Moving forward, I'd suggest the following:
- Add the ability for customers to share your products socially. I don't see any social media icons on any of the pages, especially the product pages. Add FB, Twitter, Pinterest, Google Plus.
- Do you have social media accounts for your site? If not, create the 4 above and start posting! You'll get more of a sense of community and people will be able to share what puzzles they've completed, which ones they want to purchase next etc. I'm not personally in to puzzles but I know people that are, and they can't wait to get their next one as soon as they finish one.
- Highlight your competitive advantage more (on the item template, page titles etc). What makes you stand out? Free shipping? (BTW really really confusing having two free shipping points in dollars and pounds), best customer service, fast shipping, the latest puzzles etc.) Give people a reason to shop with you.
- You've got reviews but none of the products I viewed had any reviews. I'd suggest emailing customers 3-4 weeks after purchase asking for reviews if you don't already. This would also tie in nicely with a social media pages. Reviews are great for original content.
- Your blog has no entries and is dated from 2010? This doesn't look great...
- If you're struggling to get good/unique content on the site try adding more pictures/videos/staff testimonials/staff favourites etc.
Hope some of that helps
-
"When you factor in hundreds of links on every page" - I don't really see how I could reduce the amount of links on a page? As it's an eCommerce based website there nothing on there that I can see that would be helpful to remove?
"almost no depth of content" - Yeah, this is a problem we've run into. The problem is that a jigsaw puzzle of a cat, is exactly that. There's not much more you can add "content" wise. Even if you try and force extra content out, the most we can get is "this cat looks like he's relaxing in the garden shed."
"the ability to find products through several paths" - I don't think we can really change this, as the products really do fall under multiple categories. We've done Canacolization.
-
A quick review in Open Site Explorer shows that since you apparently don't have a huge volume of links, there's way too many coming from blatantly spam based domains: wywlinks.com, onelinkseo.com, contentrichdirectory.com, organisedlinks.com, yourlinkmarket.com, regularseo.com, elaboratedirectory.com, greatindexdirectory.com, linksmaximum.com, directorysuper.com, gatewayoflinks.com....
Even if you've cleared some of these out, the overall picture is that no great effort was put into obtaining high quality off-site signals- that it was an attempt to game the Google system. Since you say you've done what you could to remove links, it's possible that I'm looking at a "before" snapshot from within OSE, so I can't definitively say this is the issue, but it sure smells like it.
From there, when you factor in hundreds of links on every page, and almost no depth of content, the ability to find products through several paths (leading in duplication issues), the site gives the appearance of being "link polluted" both inbound and on-site.
So I'd say clear out all the links you can from directories. Dramatically reduce the on-site link structure, and if you want multiple paths to products, block some of those from indexing.
Then work to get more depth of descriptive text content on your category pages, and work to get high quality off-site recognition.
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
-
Keyword On Page 1 Everywhere but Google (Site Specific)
Website: www.wheelchairparts.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mike.Bean
Keyword: wheelchair parts My website is #1 or #2 on almost every search engine besides Google. Google has us bouncing between the bottom of page 2 and top of 3. However we are on page one for "wheelchairparts". I need to get a link building campaign going for this site. I feel it's more difficult for ecommerce websites and nothing seems to fit in with Rand's Mozcon 2016 Link Building talk except hacks. I need to find a flywheel. Either way, my question is what can I do other than link building to get on page 1 of Google for the term "wheelchair parts"? Thanks in advance! - Mike Bean1 -
Start a new site to get out of Google penalties?
Hey Moz, I have several questions in regards to whether I should a start a new second site to save my online presence after a series of Google penalties. The main questions being: Is this the best way to spend my time/resources? If I’m forced to jump my company over to the new site can Google see that and transfer the penalty? I plan on all new content (no link redirect, no dup content) so do I need to kill the original site? Are there any Pro’s/cons I am missing? Summary of my situation: Looking at analytics it appears I was hit with both Penguin 2.0 and 2.1, each cutting my traffic in half, despite a link remediation campaign in the summer of 2013. There was a manual penalty also imposed on the site in the fall of 2013, which was released in early 2014. With Penguin 3.0’s release at the end of 2014, the site saw a slight uptick in organic traffic, improving from essentially nothing to next to nothing. Most of the site’s issues revolved around cheap $5 links from India in the 2006-09 time frame. This link building was abandoned, and replaced with nothing but “letting them happen naturally” from 2010 through the 2013 penalties. Since 2013 we have done a small amount of quality articles on a monthly basis to promote the site, social media, and continuous link remediation. In addition the whole site has been redesigned, optimized for speed/mobile, secured, and completely rewritten. Given all of this, the site has really only recovered to page 2 and 3 of the SERPs for our key words. Even after a highly circulated piece appeared on an Authority site (97 DA) a few months ago there was zero movement. It appears we have an anvil tied around our leg until Penguin 4.0. With all of the above, and no sign of when the next penguin will be released, I ask, is it time to start investing in a new site? With no movement in 2.5 years, it’s impossible to know where my current site stands, so I don’t know what else I can do to improve it. I am considering slowly building a new site that is a high quality informational site. My thought process is it will take a year for a new site to gain any traction with Google. If by that time my main site has not recovered, I can jump to that new site, add a commercial component, and use it as a life boat for my company. If I have recovered, then I have a future asset. Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheDude0 -
SEO question regarding rails app on www.site.com hosted on Heroku and www.site.com/blog at another host
Hi, I have a rails app hosted on Heroku (www.site.com) and would much prefer to set up a Wordpress blog using a different host pointing to www.site.com/blog, as opposed to using a gem within the actual app. Whats are peoples thoughts regarding there being any ranking implications for implementing the set up as noted in this post on Stackoverflow: "What I would do is serve your Wordpress blog along side your Rails app (so you've got a PHP and a Rails server running), and just have your /blog route point to a controller that redirects to your Wordpress app. Add something like this to your routes.rb: _`get '/blog', to:'blog#redirect'`_ and then have a redirect method in your BlogController that simply does this: _`classBlogController<applicationcontrollerdef redirect="" redirect_to="" "url_of_wordpress_blog"endend<="" code=""></applicationcontrollerdef>`_ _Now you can point at yourdomain.com/blog and it will take you to the Wordpress site._
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Anward0 -
Why has my site dropped off the face of Google???
Hi All, My site was ranking well for a long time and suddenly can't be seen at all any more. I have been trying to figure this out for some time and can't get to the bottom of it. Funny thing is also even when searching for my site with a keyword "snowboard gulmarg" my URL www.klinehinmalaya.com does not appear and somewhere way back in the listing my another page www.klinehimalaya.com/packages.php comes up. Any help would be good right now. Thanks in advance, Catherine.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | caherinechan0 -
Why is Google Still Penalizing My Site?
We got hit pretty hard by Penguin. There were some bad link issues which we've cleared up and we also had a pretty unique situation stemming from about a year ago when we changed the name of the company and created a whole new site with similar content under a different URL. We used the same phone number and address, and left the old site up as it was still performing well. Google didn't care for that so we eventually used 301 redirects to push the link juice from the old site to the new site. That's the background, here's the problem...... We've partially recovered, but there are several keywords that haven't come back anywhere near where they were in Google. We have higher page rank and more links than our competition and are performing in the top 5 for some of our keywords. Other, similar keywords, where we used to be in the top 5, we are now down on page 4 or 5. Our website is www.hudsoncabinetrydesign.com. We build custom cabinetry and furniture in Westchester County, NY just north of NYC. Examples - For "custom built-ins new york" we are number 3 on Google, number 1 on Bing/Yahoo. For "custom kitchen cabinetry ny" we are number 3 on Bing/Yahoo, not in the top 50 on Google. For "custom radiator covers ny" we used to be #1 on Google, are currently #48, currently #2 on Bing/Yahoo. Obviously, we've done something to upset the Google, but we've run out of ideas as to what it could be. Any ideas as to what is going on? Thanks so much for your feedback, Doug B.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | doug_b0 -
Redirect micro-niche site to bigger niche site?
I have a micro niche site that performs reasonably well (page 1 at least) for it's main keywords. It is an exact match domain. To save the ongoing maintenance of a site that gets less than 10 visitors a day, I was thinking of redirecting this micro niche site to a bigger site (a niche site that the micro niche fits into, if that makes sense!) Would I lose rankings because of the power that the EMD provided? Would it be better keeping it there for the backlink it provides to the bigger site (although on the same C Class IP)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BigMiniMan0 -
One site or five sites for geo targeted industry
OK I'm looking to try and generate traffic for people looking for accommodation. I'm a big believer in the quality of the domain being used for SEO both in terms of the direct benefit of it having KW in it but also the effect on CTR a good domain can have. So I'm considering these options: Build a single site using the best, broad KW-rich domain I can get within my budget. This might be something like CheapestHotelsOnline.com Advantages: Just one site to manage/design One site to SEO/market Better potential to resell the site for a few million bucks Build 5 sites, each catering to a different region using 5 matching domains within my budget. These might be domains like CheapHotelsEurope.com, CheapHotelsAsia.com etc Advantages: Can use domains that are many times 'better' by adding a geo-qualifier. This should help with CTR and search Can be more targeted with SEO & Marketing So hopefully you see the point. Is it worth the dilution of SEO & marketing activities to get the better domain names? I'm chasing the longtail searchs whetever I do. So I'll be creating 5K+ pages each targeting a specific area. These would be pages like CheapestHotelsOnline.com/Europe/France/Paris or CheapHoteslEurope.com/France/Paris to target search terms targeting hotels in Paris So with that thought, is SEO even 100% diluted? Say, a link to the homepage of the first option would end up passing 1/5000th of value through to the Paris page. However a link to the second option would pass 1/1000th of the link juice through to the Paris page. So by thet logic, one only needs to do 1/5th of the work for each of the 5 sites ... that implies total SEO work would be the same? Thanks as always for any help! David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OzDave0 -
What are the different tactics for getting ranked/ included in Google finance searches such as http://www.google.com/finance/company_news?q=NASDAQ:ADBE
I don't know what ranking factors they are using for this feed. The results vary greatly from a search done at google.com or google.com/news and google.com/finance I'm working with a website that regularly publishes finance-related news and currently gets traffic from google finance. I'm wondering what we can do to optimize our news articles to possibly show more prominently or more often. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joemascaro0