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
-
My WP website got attack by malware & now my website site:www.example.ca shows about 43000 indexed page in google.
Hi All My wordpress website got attack by malware last week. It affected my index page in google badly. my typical site:example.ca shows about 130 indexed pages on google. Now it shows about 43000 indexed pages. I had my server company tech support scan my site and clean the malware yesterday. But it still shows the same number of indexed page on google.
Technical SEO | | ChophelDoes anybody had ever experience such situation and how did you fixed it. Looking for help. Thanks FILE HIT LIST:
{YARA}Spam_PHP_WPVCD_ContentInjection : /home/example/public_html/wp-includes/wp-tmp.php
{YARA}Backdoor_PHP_WPVCD_Deployer : /home/example/public_html/wp-includes/wp-vcd.php
{YARA}Backdoor_PHP_WPVCD_Deployer : /home/example/public_html/wp-content/themes/oceanwp.zip
{YARA}webshell_webshell_cnseay02_1 : /home/example2/public_html/content.php
{YARA}eval_post : /home/example2/public_html/wp-includes/63292236.php
{YARA}webshell_webshell_cnseay02_1 : /home/example3/public_html/content.php
{YARA}eval_post : /home/example4/public_html/wp-admin/28855846.php
{HEX}php.generic.malware.442 : /home/example5/public_html/wp-22.php
{HEX}php.generic.cav7.421 : /home/example5/public_html/SEUN.php
{HEX}php.generic.malware.442 : /home/example5/public_html/Webhook.php0 -
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 -
How to fix Google index after fixing site infected with malware.
Hi All Upgraded a Joomla site for a customer a couple of months ago that was infected with malware (it wasn't flagged as infected by google). Site is fine now but still noticing search queries for "cheap adobe" etc with links to http://domain.com/index.php?vc=201&Cheap_Adobe_Acrobat_xi in web master tools (about 50 in total). These url's redirect back to home page and seem to be remaining in the index (I think Joomla is doing this automatically) Firstly, what sort of effect would these be having on on their rankings? Would they be seen by google as duplicate content for the homepage (moz doesn't report them as such as there are no internal links). Secondly what's my best plan of attack to fix them. Should I setup 404's for them and then submit them to google? Will resubmitting the site to the index fix things? Would appreciate any advice or suggestions on the ramifications of this and how I should fix it. Regards, Ian
Technical SEO | | iragless0 -
Business Address SERP problem in Google- What DO?
Hi Guys, I have a business at "30 Auto Center Dr, Irivne, CA" when I search for "30 Auto Center Dr" Google search results will show a map result for 30 auto center dr, Tustin CA. It will show this map result for all surrounding cities and will only show Irivne, if I set my location to irvine. I'm not sure why this is happening. Cities that are closer to Irvine are also showing a map to the address located in Tustin. Since Google is choosing to display this map result, I feel that this is causing me to lose customers. I have already done business listings and local seo to my current address,and was wondering if it would be worth it to change my address (My building has more than one address). Would this even be a good idea? What do you guys think are my options here? attached is the screenshot of the map result I am talking about. 1ywIMVt.png
Technical SEO | | qlkasdjfw0 -
SEO Issues with Avactis Shopping Cart Please Help(Resolved)
I am seeking advise or help with several issues I am having with Avactis. First is Title Duplicates or adds the same on every CMS page Seal It Green Sealants - Non-Toxic Organic Sealant Products so for instance it say Contact Us-Seal It Green Sealants - Non-Toxic Organic Sealant Products or Whats the Difference Seal It or Xtreme -Seal It Green Sealants - Non-Toxic Organic Sealant Products every cms page it adds Seal It Green Sealants - Non-Toxic Organic Sealant Products to the title description. which in turn makes my Title Descriptions TOO LONG! Second is the very lengthy urls. I came into this project after the site was developed and there are more issues than I ever imagined. Duplicated Pages, Titles etc all over the place. Trying to work on one issue at a time. ( I think re-building the site using something else would of been a quicker solution) But Client didn't want to do that. Any advise or tips to get through this process with this platform would be extremely appreciated.
Technical SEO | | MACameron0 -
Penalities in a brand new site, Sandbox Time or rather a problem of the site?
Hi guys, 4 weeks ago we launched a site www.adsl-test.it. We just make some article marketing and developed a lots of functionalities to test and share the result of the speed tests runned throug the site. We have been for weeks in 9th google serp page then suddendly for a day (the 29 of february) in the second page next day the website home is disappeared even to brand search like adsl-test. The actual situalion is: it looks like we are not banned (site:www.adsl-test.it is still listed) GWT doesn't show any suggestion and everything looks good for it we are quite high on bing.it and yahoo.it (4th place in the first page) for adsl test search Anybody could help us to understand? Another think that I thought is that we create a single ID for each test that we are running and these test are indexed by google Ex: <cite>www.adsl-test.it/speedtest/w08ZMPKl3R or</cite> <cite>www.adsl-test.it/speedtest/P87t7Z7cd9</cite> Actually the content of these urls are quite different (because the speed measured is different) but, being a badge the other contents in the page are pretty the same. Could be a possible reason? I mean google just think we are creating duplicate content also if they are not effectively duplicated content but just the result of a speed test?
Technical SEO | | codicemigrazione0 -
My site cannot be found by google at all
I don't know why but our company site can not be found by google at all. I have submitted to google webmaster, have social media point to, etc, Is there any reason for this? url for our website is www.bistosamerica.com Thank you
Technical SEO | | BistosAmerica0 -
Why are old versions of images still showing for my site in Google Image Search?
I have a number of images on my website with a watermark. We changed the watermark (on all of our images) in May, but when I search for my site getmecooking in Google Image Search, it still shows the old watermark (the old one is grey, the new one is orange). Is Google not updating the images its search results because they are cached in Google? Or because it is ignoring my images, having downloaded them once? Should we be giving our images a version number (at the end of the file name)? Our website cache is set to 7 days, so that's not the issue. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Techboy0