Would this drop indicate a manual penalty?

[Scott.lucas]

Website short link: f c w . i m (copy and remove the spaces)

A few weeks ago now we dropped from around page 2 all the way to around page 14 for they keyword watches on Google UK. We have remained around the level of page 12-17 ever since.

Other important keywords which we monitor have slowly moved from page 1 positions onto page 2 or the bottom of page 1. Of course this is really worrying us as we are an e-commerce website and we are in peak season.

Natural suspects would be duplicate content issues, crawl issues or bad links. All of which we have looked into and spent the past month improving to the best of our ability.

I have gone through almost all of the content on the website. We have our own written descriptions on our 5000 products and have identified a small amount with issues using Copyscape. We have lots of unique customer product reviews and we have our own unique blog.

I have looked into Crawl Issues and fine tuned URL parameter settings, usage of canonical and added next and prev tags. All of the faceted navigation which shouldn't be indexed has been excluded through canonical for well over a month and again recently using URL parameters in WT.

Our link profile is small and doesn't contain a lot of spam links - we have identified some and wish to get them removed but even so I don't think the small quantity of links (a lot of which are nofollow also) would justify dropping us over around 100 places for a clearly relevant keyword.

The only other thing that might be an issue is a large number of on page links. This is partly due to drop down page navigation. All our pages are being indexed by Google though so I'm not sure if it is a problem. You could argue it dilutes page rank, but you would think Google's algorithms would take recurring page navigation into account somehow - removing it would probably be detrimental to our users.

So really we wanted to see if any SEO experts could help me out with this. It seems to us that it is either something we have already identified (causing a lot more impact than we would expect following the latest Google updates) or something else. Maybe a manual penalty?

Thanks if you read the whole thing! Didn't intend to write this much really!

[Scott.lucas]

Hey Ryan havent heard anything yet.

Have you had a chance to investigate further?

Thanks

[Scott.lucas]

Great, I look forward to hearing your response and proposed strategy.

The drop for watches was the first major indication that we had a problem and it was before the October Penguin update. Seems to be more likely looking at Analytics that it was late September.

Ever since then it seems are rankings have been going slowly backwards. Regardless, we need a new SEO strategy ASAP.

Thanks

[RyanKent]

**We have filed a reconsideration request but are worried they will look at our link - like responders have - and consider them low quality and then penalise us more. **

It is theoretically possible but highly unlikely. My best presumption is a basic "has my site been penalized" type of Reconsideration Request would be handled by a junior member of the Spam Team who would simply respond as to whether manual action has been taken on the site or not. Matt Cutts previously shared when the Spam Team receives a Reconsideration Request, they do not go looking for additional violations but if something obvious is discovered during their normal investigation, they may take action.

[RyanKent]

Hi Scott,

You hit the key points with your analysis. You mentioned a "slight drop" around the time of the September Panda update. Site traffic fluctuates normally so I would not normally be concerned with a slight drop.

You also mentioned a "plummet" for the keyword watches which is a different matter. Does that plummet coincide with a major update such as Panda?

I have received your email and will respond shortly. We would be glad to assist.

[Scott.lucas]

Well looking at the dates I have found it to be around the time of the overlapping Panda and EMD updates. I didn't originally suspect our link profile instead some sort of duplicate content issue. So I've gone through all of that - canonical, next prev, parameters, sitemaps, no index on generic forms, Copyscape on a whole bunch of pages (some still to fix but I would put us at 95% unique), new blog posts and improved product titles.

But a month later no real change. Do you think Google is still processing my updates (maybe some of the canonical stuff which is faceted navigation related)? How would I determine if I need to start removing links?

We have filed a reconsideration request but are worried they will look at our link - like responders have - and consider them low quality and then penalise us more.

Let me know what you think.

[MarieHaynes]

I would highly suggest that before you go removing links you find out what the problem actually is.  I have seen a number of webmasters who have removed a large amount of links only to find out eventually that their site was hit by Panda.  You mentioned you may have had duplicate content issues and that would be a Panda issue.  Removing links could do more harm in this case.

You've gotten some great advice in this thread.  File for reconsideration to see if there is a manual penalty.  A quick look at your backlinks doesn't make me think Penguin.  However, you've got a number of sites redirected to yours so if any of them have a Penguin issue then you would have transferred it.

Have a good look at your analytics, sorted by organic search traffic and see if you can determine if the drop happened on a known Panda date or on a Penguin date and that will hopefully help you figure things out a little better.

[Scott.lucas]

We have examined our Analytics already and it would seem to indicate a slight drop in Google traffic that coincides with the Exact Match Domain and Panda updates that ran at the end of September. This is when we first noticed our plummet for the keyword watches.

It seems to be almost exclusive to Google organic traffic. We rank reasonably well in Bing/Yahoo. Other channels like CPC are of course not showing any issues.

It seems to have affected some keywords more than others but it feels like the authority of the domain is slowly being reduced in Google's eyes. We still rank for more specific stuff and they are still indexing us.

I have made a general response further down that you might be interested in.

We are actually looking to partner with an SEO company that can improve our rankings. Is this something Vitopian SEO would be interested in?

[Scott.lucas]

It would seem the general consensus of responses focusses on our link profile.

While I will hold my hands up and say there are some questionable links in there I'm not sure what to do about some of them. We haven't actively "built" links for quite some time as the results look unnatural and it would be dangerous to do so. I can contact webmasters where possible and ask them to remove links but where do I draw the line?

Any overly commercial anchor text is probably a given. Do I also go after really old directory links, years old in some cases? Should I go after websites that are crawling the web and linking back to us (probably not?). There seems to be a little bit of automated stuff in there which isn't down to us.

Should I disavow any comment spam in the profile or stuff which looks bad? The thing is, nobody here will own up to doing it and it and they have all appeared in Aug 2011 - so it could be a rogue contractor or I wouldn't put it past a competitor (they've resorted to DDoS in the past, so negative SEO isn't out of their league). If I disavow these links would it be seen as admitting to being a spammer? I don't want Google to single us out any further.

Or would my time be better spent trying to get more links? Problem is, we've already been trying to get natural links for 8 years. There are companies which will charge us thousands to make infographics and "great content" but there's no guarantee of it working for us.

In the case of Wikipedia - I can't think of many reasons why someone would put a link up to http://www.wikipedia.org with that as the anchor text or something similar, unless the way there are posting the link doesn't allow them to change the anchor text. It is probably the case of automated links throughout the web as they are such a massive website.

I think people would be even less likely to do a link like that to our website, we do have the majority of our link going to our brand name though.

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Jamie

I just took a quick look at the back link profile and it could be a case study for a penguin style anchor text.

Where are the natural links? Where are the branded URL links? It is just so keyword heavy in the anchors that there is no way in the world that it is natural.

Take a look at your backlink profile:

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?site=www.firstclasswatches.co.uk

Then compare that to something totally organic like say, wikipedia:

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?site=www.wikipedia.org

Now, that is an extreme example, but that is the point. You represent one end of a spectrum with just artifical, anchort text driven links and wikipedia represents the other end with natural editorial links.

Wikipedia has like the top 20 as URL variations, you have the top 20 as keyword variations.

I did a bit of an analysis of the various penguin analysis's out there and tried to come up with some basic rules for anchor text and yours is certainly a mess. The following is probably worth a read (to save me a bit of typing here):

http://www.bowlerhat.co.uk/blog/seo/anchor-text-ratios-and-link-building/ 

This is a five minute analysis but I would pretty much hang my hat on some kind of link penalty or devaluation so it's time to clean house!

Hope this helps

Marcus

[RyanKent]

If you haven't been de-indexed then you really can't file a re-inclusion request because you haven't technically been "excluded."

Google uses the term "Reconsideration Request" whereas Bing uses the term "Reinclusion Request". Can you clarify which search engine you are having troubles with?

Bing is much more selective then Google with respect to the pages they index, and it is not uncommon for them to remove a "bad" site from their index, hence their choice of the term "reinclusion".

Google typically does not remove a site from their index but rather lowers the ranking which has the same affect in terms of the traffic drop. When you file a Reconsideration Request you are literally asking Google to reconsider how they choose to index your site.

Concerning Google, if you suspect manual action might have been taken, you certainly can file a Reconsideration Request. In my experience, Google quickly responds and will inform you if any manual action has been taken on the site.

Shortly after submitting a Reconsideration Request, you should receive the following response:

We've received a request from a site owner to reconsider how we index the following site: http://www.XXXXXX.com/

We'll review the site. If we find that it's no longer in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines, we'll reconsider our indexing of the site. Please allow several weeks for the reconsideration request. We do review all requests, but unfortunately we can't reply individually to each request.

---

After a period of time, Google will respond either notifying you of a penalty or stating a manual penalty does not exist. In my experience, this response presently comes in about a week. I have heard reports from others they have not received a response or it has taken much longer. I can only share my agency works with a lot of penalties and this is my experience. Below is an example of a response I received for a client on November 1st.

---

Dear site owner or webmaster of http://XXXXXX.com/,

We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://XXXXXX.com/ for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team.

Of course, there may be other issues with your site that affect your site's ranking. Google's computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users.

If you've experienced a change in ranking which you suspect may be more than a simple algorithm change, there are other things you may want to investigate as possible causes, such as a major change to your site's content, content management system, or server architecture. For example, a site may not rank well if your server stops serving pages to Googlebot, or if you've changed the URLs for a large portion of your site's pages. This article has a list of other potential reasons your site may not be doing well in search.

If you're still unable to resolve your issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.

Sincerely,

Google Search Quality Team

[danatanseo]

Hi Jamie and Ryan,

Jamies, you said "Our link profile is small" - How small is small? If it's small and your only links  are somewhat questionable, then, okay maybe I can understand. However, my gut says that's not it.

Ryan, you say that you can find out if you were manually penalized by Google by submitting a reconsideration request. My experience with Google does not play that out. If you haven't been de-indexed then you really can't file a re-inclusion request because you haven't technically been "excluded."

Okay, all that being said, and we are in the same spot as James. We have been in business for over 40 years, do #RCS and our Website has been online since 1996.  Last week we had a number of keywords we had ranking between pages 2 and 3 of Google (We had many more on page one but I'm not going to talk about those).

Following up on a suggestion that was made by Fabio Riccota at MozCon2012, I decided it would be a good idea to isoiate keywords ranking on Page 2 and target those for improvement to get to page 1. I decided, before embarking on any campaigns, I'd check the current rank of those 30-40 keywords prior to trying to optimize the site and move them up toe page one.

What happened next shocked me.

I loaded them in my Firefox RankChecker tool only to discover that all but 4-5 of 50 keywords had dropped out of the top 200 SERPS.

What's even more discouraging is that this is after we fixed a big problem with a meta refresh on our home page, addressed all of our 404 errors and also worked through every single duplicate content issues identified in GWT.

James, I am with you. It looks like we have both dotted our i's and crossed out t's...what are we supposed to do now? What is it we haven't done????

Dana

[MoosaHemani]

Ryan is pretty much right on his point... I spent 2mins on your link profile data and I can say that this more seems like a link penalty. The links pointing to you are mostly spammy and irrelevant.

I think its better to check your messages in Google Webmaster tool and see if you received any email from Google.

In other case there are two things you can do:

1. Design a viral link campaign that allows natural links to come in, focus on the link quality and relevancy.
2. Use Link Disavow tool by Google to discount shitty links that are available in your profile.

And this should help you increase your rankings within few weeks of time.

Hope this helps~

[RyanKent]

You could be impacted by manual action from Google's spam team (i.e. a manual penalty), a named algorithm update such as Penguin, Panda, etc. or one of the 50 other algorithm updates Google makes each month.

The easiest way to tell if your site has been manually penalized is to ask Google (i.e. file a Reconsideration Request). Google will tell you if they have taken manual action on the site.

There are numerous other steps you can take to help diagnose why the drop in traffic occurred:

• examine your Google Analytics data to see on what date the traffic dropped

• drill down further to confirm what source(s) were involved. Did the traffic drop across the board? Or just for Google organic search?

• how did the drop happen? Did it only affect specific keywords or pages?

The above information is of key importance. I would share your backlink profile is very spammy. It would take further investigation to confirm but there is a significant chance you are impacted by a manual penalty for manipulative links or a Penguin update.