Recovering from an Automatic penalty
-
My website dropped from ~15 to 500 + for our main keywords in target markets (but are still doing okay in other countries and for other keywords)
I cleaned my site up and contacted Google who told me no manual spam actions were taken on my site. The only thing I can think is that we suffered from an automatic penalty (the drop corresponded with a small panda update).
If that is in fact what happened, how do we recover?
Also feel free to contribute other ideas about what may have occurred.
-
any kind of time estimate for when we should be re-crawled?
-
In that case, I would say that you should follow eyepaq's advice above. It's pretty much spot on for the problem you have.
-
Penalty date - July 28
Past SEO - usual exact match stuff and a little link buying
Clean up - remove/change links, but internal and external and de-optimize on penalized so keyword is under-optimized and no way could be interpreted as keyword stuffing.
Told Google - sent excel with all the cleanup we did
We are in the gaming industry and it seems like most of our links are coming from affiliates. I told Google this as well since we should not be penalized if our affiliates are doing scammy things.
-
There are still a lot of questions you have to answer before any specific advice can be given. Without answering these questions, it is impossible to say whether you have been penalised for one thing or another (such as an 'algo anchor text penalty').
For example, when exactly did the drop occur? What is the URL of your site? What SEO have you undertaken in the past? What did you do to 'clean up' your site? What else did Google tell you (if anything)?
With this kind of information, it would be easier to pin-point exactly what has happened to your site.
-
Based on your description it looks like an algo anchor text penalty.
That means your main term is overused in on page optimisation and/or used as anchor text way to much.
If this is the case you should start de-optimizing for this term and change or remove any "bad" links that is using this term as anchor text.
First of all you should identify if your link profile is un balanced - that means again, if you have as ratio a lot of in coming links using this term as anchor text.
Is this term also part of your domain name ? You can't really do much about this (the domain thing that is) but at least you can de-optimize teh site so the term is not all over the place.
Google likes to be told what toi rank for and for what term but not in a very loud voice - if you know what I mean.
Once you've cleaned / edited some bad links that used this term as anchor text and you've tunned down a noch the on-page optimisation for the term (internal links/anchors, h1, url format, titles and even content / text within your site) and based on the size of your site (as number of pages vs crawling numbers) you will then have to wait for the site to be re-crawled and you will recover. However you will probably not go back to the initial position (around 15) as some factors that were coming into play for your 15 position will no longer be in place / counting towards your rankings.
As soon as you recover you will need to build a plan for this term in order to improve rankings but don't go again over borad with the optimisation... eg: build good links to the page /that is ranking for this term but without the term as anchor text, channel your internal PR towards this page but again without heavy optimisation around the term.
Hope it helps.
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
-
Two high ranking pages instantly dropped from index - no manual penalty notification
We are facing an issue where two of our major rankings pages have just completely disappeared from search results. This has happened in the last 24 - 48 hours and there has been no changes made to the site. From what we can tell, it's only impacted two pages (but two very important category pages). I have double and triple checked all standard indexing protocols - Search Console URL inspection says the pages are fine to crawl and index. URLs have been requested to re-index but nothing has worked. This would have me to believe it could be a manual action yet there are no notifications in Search Console and we are listed as 'No issues detected' in all versions of our web property. Can anyone else think what could be the reason?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vuly0 -
Positions dropped and do not recover
Hi all, Site: https://www.fascinators.com.au k/w: fascinators (this is the main one I am looking at) About 2 years ago, I redesigned the site. It used to be on first positions in Google Australia. After redesign, positions dropped and never recovered. No matter what I do, I can not get them back. I even involved professional SEO agency for the last 6 month to help build links, but nothing works. (old site used really old non mobile-friendly engine) As far as I know site is technically sound with no issues. In the last few month position for my main keyword 'fascinators' jumps really wildly. From position 9 to not being in Google first 100. And jump can happen overnight. As of today it disappeared from first 100 again. I am really tearing my hair out on what can be wrong. Link building is underway. This is one area I am aware of. Thinking of keyword spamming, i removed lots of 'fascinators' from URL, but that did not seem to help much. Any ideas will be greatly appreciated! Thanks, Rudolf
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rudolfl1 -
Spammy keywords in our sub-domain but no penalty?
Hi, We have cigarettes and viagra as keywords in our sub-domain where our clients can post their business content. We have decent number of impressions and clicks for these related keywords. I have seen that these two words, especially "viagra" is most spammed. So are these hurting us? We dropped post Penguin update. Any correlation? Do you think that these keywords penalise us? We don't have messages or suggestion from Google Thanks, Satish
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Very Slow Recovery after Manual Penalty Removed - Are we missing something?
Our site was handed a manual penalty in November 2013 where exact match anchor text and low quality directory submissions seemed to be the problem. We began the process of link removal, reconfiguration and disavowing. We had already planned to change our domain in early 2014 to coincide with our SSL certificate renewal and although we were hesitant to do this with the manual penalty still there we proceeded and 301'd most of the site but left the pages that were the landing page for most of the exact match links as 302 to the new domain. We continued to work on removing the manual penalty for the old domain as we didn't want it to pass over to the new one and eventually this was removed n March 2014 Now the penalty is gone are we safe to change those 302 redirects to 301 so everything redirects. The problem we have is that six months on, a lot of the pages for the old domain are still indexed and even though we are indexed for the new domains are rankings haven't recovered. Is it just a case of needing to build up a new quality link profile to replace the links that were disregarded or removed when recovering from the penalty or we missing something else
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ham19790 -
Any SEO penalties for hosting a site on a sub-domain.
Hi, A client of ours has previously been hosting their main website on a sub-domain of their primary URL. They currently have a training application being hosted on the main domain. They also currently have a redirect in place so when you go to www.xzy.com, you're redirected to xzy.xzy.com. If need need to stick with this set-up for the website relaunch later this month, my question is: are there any SEO drawbacks to having the entire site hosted on a sub-domain? Should we fight to get the training application off the main domain, at which point we can host everything on the main domain? Many thanks! Dan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThisisPlanB0 -
Algorithm Penalty?
I've read the FAQs and searched the help center. The URL in question is: http://goo.gl/9lGqxDSince this website was relaunched around the same time as the Panda algorithm update, it's dropped from the 1st page of results down to page 6 or lower. Essentially, this website no longer ranks well in the Google UK for relevant keywords to the business when combined with the place names in it's geographical operation areas.It's worth noting that the website ranks very well in other search search engines such as Bing! The website had a lot of spammy links which we've requested to be removed from the respective site owners. Most of which are either non-responsive or want extortionate amounts of money to remove the links so we have used Google disavow links tool. We suspect the site is being penalised as a result of the spammy inbound links something which is supported by the fact that only the new pages or pages with fresh content are ranking (http://goo.gl/D1NpxH). However, Google Webmaster tools reports no messages or critical issues.On the whole the website is updated occasionally. The writing is very easy to understand, it's quick to load, URLs are clear and the titles and descriptions are partly optimised.We're believe that our only option is to abandon the current domain and completely rewrite the content for a new domain. Does anyone else have any ideas how we can fix this before we go ahead?Many thanks, Ben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chichesterdesign0