Small business sites banned by google. Please help.
-
Hi.
My 2 sites http://www.painterdublin.com and http://www.tilers-dublin.com were banned by google update in November 2012.
Both were ranking fairly well in search results: painterdublin generating cca 600/month and tilers-dublin cca 300/month organic traffic from google. After update it is about 70% less.
Is there anyone willing to take a look at my pages and give me some advice about what to do to improve the situation?
thank you very much
-
The 27th of September narrows your list of possibilites down to two likely ones. The 27th was a Panda update and the 28th was EMD. Using an EMD domain name is not going to get you penalized, but it's possible that you were previously getting a lot of ranking benefit from having the keyword in your domain and now you have lost that benefit.
Panda affects sites with low quality. Often there are issues with duplicate content (i.e. content that exists on other sites on the web) or thin content.
I would guess Panda is your issue, but I'd need to dig in much further to say so for sure. For example, this article appears on your site and also on http://www.homeinsights.org/house-painting-cost/. Duplication like this can cause Panda to affect you.
-
Hello Marie. thank you very much for your help.
Now looking at my analytics for painterdublin.com exact date of the traffic drop is around 27th of september 2012. (sorry for that November)
No, I didnt receive any message in google webmaster.
I am using EMD domain names painterdublin.com and tilers-dublin.com, I wonder if that is a problem too.
Also content of my landing pages is heavily optimized for those terms (painter dublin, tilers dublin), I wonder if I crossed the "googles line" with it.
What do u think Marie?
thank u very much again
-
Hi CMC. thank you very much for your help. Now I know sites werent banned but penalized, thank u.
Now looking at my analytics for painterdublin.com exact date of the traffic drop is around 27th of september 2012. And I lost traffic from keywords like: painters dublin, painters and decorators dublin, dublin painters etc. which are my most important keywords.
There must be also some problem with my domain name, because I heard google was going after EMD's which "painterdublin.com" certainly is. What do you think?
thank you very much again
-
Hi Tom. thank u very much for your help. No, I didnt receive any message in google webmaster regarding unnatural link building. And yes, I am aware of crosslinking my sites in footers, I will remove those links, I hope it helps.
Also I am wondering if content on my landing pages is ok regarding "keyword density". Do you have an idea about this?
thank you very much again
-
The key to finding out how to improve is to first find out why your sites were affected.
Can you determine the date on which your sites were affected? There was no Penguin update in November. There was a Panda update November 5 and November 21. Panda is about on page quality. If your drop happened immediately after one of those dates then I would look for duplicate content on your site. A quick look shows me that your blog has content that also exists on other sites on the web. Getting rid of that content can help. If that is the issue then you should recover by the next Panda refresh although some sites take a few refreshes to recover.
Or, did you receive a notice in your webmaster tools of a manual warning? If so then that's a whole other issue.
There are many other possibilites. If these were new sites they could have been receiving a honeymoon boost and then been placed lower down on the SERPS. Or, you could have a malware issue or a problem with robots.txt.
But really, if you can tag the date of your drop then that's half the battle.
-
The sites have not been "banned" by Google. "Banned" suggests that they removed the sites from their index. If you search site:painterdublin.com, you'll see that's not the case.
What was the exact date of the traffic drop? Did you lose traffic from particular keywords, or from everything?
-
First, can I ask if you received any message from Google in Webmaster tools? I'm wondering whether you got an unnatural links warning.
At first glance, I think you may have received a Penguin/Over-optimisation penalty. Looking at the anchor text diversity in your link profile (http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?site=www.tilers-dublin.com) and (http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?site=www.painterdublin.com) the vast majority of your links come from anchor text heavy terms, like "painting dublin" and "tilers dublin".
Furthermore, it looks as though the majority of these links are coming from the footer from your group of websites and are site-wide. After the Penguin update, this quickly became a big red flag.
My recommendations would be first to check what message you've received from Google. After that, I would remove all of the footer links on your sites. I think you would be OK replacing these with a single link, on the homepage, to your websites - provided that you mark it as "nofollow".
Once that is done, I would file a reconsideration request. I haven't checked many of your other backlinks, so it might be the case that you would need to remove any other spammy links you can find there.
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
-
Google Search Console "Text too small to read" Errors
What are the guidelines / best practices for clearing these errors? Google has some pretty vague documentation on how to handle this sort of error. User behavior metrics in GA are pretty much in line with desktop usage and don't show anything concerning Any input is appreciated! Thanks m3F3uOI
Technical SEO | | Digital_Reach2 -
Ecommerce website - Transition from one subdomain to another. Please help!
Hi MOZers, I have an ecommerce website with its mobile version of the site sitting in a subdomain. It is going to be transferred to another subdomain on the same website. How do I ensure that I save/carry over most of the traffic, authority and equity to the new sudomain? At the moment, we are not looking to get rid of the subdomain but maybe later, yes. Malika
Technical SEO | | Malika10 -
Does Google differentiate between a site with spammy link building practices from a victim of a negative SEO attack?
I've be tasked with figuring out how to recover our rankings as we are likely being hurt by an algorithmic penalty. I have no idea if this was the workings of a previously hired SEO or the result of negative SEO, **how does Google differentiate between a site with bad/spammy link building practices from a victim of a negative SEO attack? **
Technical SEO | | Syed_Raza0 -
Windows Acces used for e-commerce site - help needed
Hello everybody, I am working on this e-commerce website built on windows access and it's a nightmare to change the html content on it.has anyone used it before? It doesn't allow me to change the content for the html tags even though it should and i don't have a clue about what to do. Thanks oscar
Technical SEO | | PremioOscar0 -
Can anyone review my site please?
just wandering if anyone can review my site and give me some feedback please much grateful I have just really trying to get clients don't have any yet and any help would be great. reseolve.com
Technical SEO | | ReSEOlve0 -
Time on site
From what I understand, if you search for a keyword say "blue widgets" and you click on a result, and then spend 10 seconds there, and go back to google and click on a different result google will track that first result as being not very relevant. What I don't understand is what happens when (and this happens all the time, i did it today) you click on a result go to that page, find it (not?) relevant and then get distracted, phone call, or someone calls you into another room in the office. You end up accidentally leaving the tab open all day long, and never go back to the google search. So your time on site to google is what? infinity? there must be an upper cap here? at some point they must say, ok, the user is gone, time on site = our maximum = 5 minutes?!? Get me? any insight?
Technical SEO | | adriandg0 -
Why did our site drop in Google rankings?
My site's URL (web address) is: http://tinyurl.com/3svn2l9 Hi there, We operate a travel site that lists numerous tours, accommodation and activities. Since 6th August 2011 we have dropped from top 10 SERP rankings of our pages to around result number 100 (page 10) and losing massive amount of visitors via Google Search. Our Yahoo and Bing rankings are still in the top10. We need your advice and quick! The last changes we have made are the following: -redirected the non-www version to the www version on the 1st August -bought advertising with a follow link in a sidebar that is being populated across the site (+4000 pages) about 2 months ago -added a blog to the website 2 weeks ago and posted 2 posts to date. Additionally, our website structure allows visitors (and bots) to see the same listings via different URLs which caused duplicate content. This has been the case since the launch of our website about 1 year ago. To prevent this duplicate content we have placed canonical tags on the individual listings pages. Why did our site all of a sudden plummet in the rankings?
Technical SEO | | Robbern0