Google manual penalty?
-
Is it possible to receive a manual penalty on just 2 keywords (or any penalty for that matter) from Google but receive no message in GWT? I am going to give a lot of information here, in the hopes that it will be helpful. My apologies if it's too long.
Some of you who are here a lot, may remember my panicked questions in early January. I have learned a ton since then but I still haven't fully solved our mystery and one of the questions that remains is if perhaps one can receive a penalty for particular keywords only and not receive any messages.
Our company name, company name.com and company name + location is still coming up #1. We also still have a couple of other keywords at #4 and #7 so it seems our site wasn't penalized. My over-zealousness with the keyword usage on our Home page was pointed out to me here in the forum by Dr. Pete so I made some significant changes on that back in January and continue to tweak although I'm afraid at this point, to do too much that may cause us to lose ranking in the last two good keywords...Meanwhile, our listings on Bing and Yahoo are great and mostly continue to go up.
Back Story: We had a huge drop in the SERPS for a particular set of keywords that I feel are our most critical, at the end of December 2012 after being #3 for over a decade. We had a smaller drop in October, that worried me and I worked on the on-page and brought it back to #7 sometime in Nov or early Dec and then it disappeared to "not in top 50". I believe I overdid it.
I also got a lot of great advice and leads from Mike Tek and have been having a blast being engaged in reading, learning, following, commenting. I believe I have created some good content since January by creating a company blog and adding posts regularly- 19 so far. I have also gotten some reviews on Yelp, claimed more local listings, worked on our Google+ page, joined Communities, have been promoting our blog posts on FB, Linkedin, Twitter, Google+. We are very short in the inbound link department and I have yet to activate solutions on that score, (and sadly, the majority of our links are in client footers as we are a web design company and I don't think we should remove them without being sure they've hurt us). I am at the point of looking for some help for hire for link building as I am realizing my own limitations.
-
So sorry! One more question, please, Takeshi. My husband just reminded me that we purchased a second domain name in October and set up a redirect or forwarding to our site domain. He kept the page authority for the main URL. Our site is www.fateyes.com and the additional URL is www.fateyeswebdesign.com and that points to fateyes.com.
-
oh yeah, duh. It's not personalization. Thanks.
-
By personalization I meant sometimes our search results can be personalized, leading to different SERPs than what other people would see.
-
Wow- thanks again! Much appreciated.
We did make some changes in September and early October and I was pushing with on-page SEO on the Home page between Oct. and Dec. after the first hint of slippage, but have since pulled it back and tried to revert as much as I could remember. In late September and early October, our overseas programming company made some suggestions for page descriptions and meta keywords that I adopted, but that shouldn't matter.
The big thing they did was some link building and one article submission which I may have overstepped duplicate content with an article, now blog post, on our site to a certain extent, not understanding that issue at the time. There were 24 links listed and 268 submitted. None of the anchor text is a match for the keywords in question. Believe me, I will NEVER do that again. I don't think these guys would do anything shady, but now that I've learned more, I don't like what they did much anyway.
But with no messages from Google, it's so hard to know if it's the links. I was studying their report this morning, and there are some sites with 0 PR. I'm thinking about trying to get those removed. Do you think I should?
What do you mean by personalization? And no, the site's been up since 1998.
Thanks again!
-
It's really difficult to tell what's happened in situations like this without knowing all the details. Broadly speaking though, there are only 3 possibilities:
- Your competitors have improved their pages
- You changed something on your site that is causing you to rank lower
- Google changed their algorithm in such a way as to negatively affect you
You said that #1 probably isn't the issue here. Then you need to look at every single change you made to your site within the timeframe of the drop, and see if you can figure out what you did that might have caused it. Did you change the content? Did you edit the underlying code? Any technical site changes? Any configurations changes in GWT? Etc. If it's something you can reverse easily, try reverting some of the changes you made, and see if they had an impact.
If none of that works, and you aren't doing anything shady, then it was probably an algo change. The question then is how to get Google to see your site as relevant for those terms. Link building helps. Quality content is crucial. Since it looks like you are doing local SEO, then things like business citations, listing in business directories, Google+ profiles, all those things will help. Look at your competitors, and see what they are doing. If they are doing anything that makes their site better than yours, steal it.
That's basically all you can do. All this is assuming this isn't some reporting error or personalization, or that your site isn't brand new and being thrown into the sanbox.
-
Thank you so much, Takeshi. I really appreciate your input.
I doubt it has to do with link over-optimization. Our anchor text doesn't match the keywords in question which are 'web design' plus our location and our location 'web design'. They are very competitive words and I can see dropping several positions or to lower pages, but a sudden one time drop to out of top 50 seems to point to something severely wrong. Our competition at the top of the rankings have a lot of links and a lot more content than we do, so I understand why they are there, and it's possible that some newer companies have outranked us momentarily, but I am sure that the 50 or so ahead of us --- well, there aren't even that many web design or development companies here or nearby. Our domain authority, while it's dropped during this situation, is still higher than many. I think it may come down to a simple case of them having more links than us-some do and some don't, and I'll bet many aren't quality.
So true that there are no guarantees....and yet, I find it really compelling to try to figure out what happened. Not knowing what's broken makes it harder to fix and also harder to not repeat the same error- although, I have a lot of good ideas on what not to do in the future. I do get a little preoccupied by this question from time to time, but primarily, I've been working on creating high quality, relevant content and promoting the content in the hopes of getting links. As I mentioned, I'm on the cusp of trying to get some assistance with a link building campaign because I know it's a weak spot for me and I welcome suggestions of someone to work with.
-
Rankings for individual keywords change all the time, but in my experience drops to specific keywords have usually been the result of link over-optimization (too many links with the same, unnatural anchor text).
Other potential causes: losing links that you used to have, competitors optimizing their pages, any changes you have made to those pages which may impact relevance, changes to your internal linking, or Google updates devaluing previously values links.
There are many reasons why keywords fluctuate. Google controls the SERPs, and your position is not guaranteed even though you may have been there for years. If there are any obvious site errors, fix them, but beyond that you just have to focus on building authoritative links and creating high quality, relevant content.
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
-
Why am I seeing so many referalls to my root domain from Facebook in Google Analytics?
When we look at referalls from Facebook in Google Analytics, more than 50% (and sometimes upwards of 80%) of the traffic we're getting is listed as landing on our root domain. The thing is, we don't have any direct links TO our root domain on our Facebook page. So is this legitimate traffic, and how are they getting to our page if we have no links to it? We do post links to stories, videos, etc, but those are to the individual pages, not to our root domain. When I look at those pages that we link to, they do have traffic numbers, but nothing compared to the root domain. Any thoughts would be helpful. Thanks.
Social Media | | TexAgs0 -
Shortcut Link and Referral domain in Google Analytics
Hello, One of my clients has a Facebook page for his company, and his social media manager posts some promotional and educational posts on daily basis. the social media manager uses affiliate ID's in the destination URL to track traffic and leads that come from the social media and to make it look nicer he uses shortcut links service - bitly. Now I have a few questions about this: I don't see traffic comes from bit.ly or bitly.com in Google Analytics, my question: is using 301 redirect makes Google Analytics understand that the last website which sent the traffic to my website is not the actual Referral website? Is using shortcut links in the social media damages the links value (even though they are <nofollow>links - but still considered as signals from social media</nofollow> Thanks. LorS1nd.jpg
Social Media | | JonsonSwartz0 -
Google Plus: Personal vs Business Accounts I am Confused!
Hi so I have both accounts set up, I use my business g+ for sign posting my new blog posts & latest news. I have Authorship set up on my Blog and that is working fine. I am personally v much a large part of the brand, www.over50choices.co.uk and have my face on the home page and most social property, so when i do use my G+, FB & Twitter accounts, whilst they are the business accounts, its lead by me. So just what do I use my G+ Persoanl Account for? I have read that i should either share or duplicate the my updates on both accounts, but will that look like duplication? I dont have many G+ followers currently but intend to develop this in the next few months, so its important that I get this right if i am to optimise my activity? Your help appreciated. Ash
Social Media | | AshShep10 -
Google Auth and brands/individuals problem
So you can auth pages with personal google+ profiles - and its being suggested by some that this could now help rankings if that person has lots of people in their circles. So what about brand/companies content? why cant they auth the content with their Google+ profile to get the content ranking better. It doesn't seem right an individual blogger can do this but a company cannot who has written lots of guides. An example is a holiday company has written some awesome content on resorts around the World - how to use the auth for that content to rank higher? - currently only possible to link up an individual as writing the content not the brand/company itself. Any suggestions on this much appreciated. I do not want to lose any gain there might be from this new bonus given from Google.
Social Media | | pauledwards0 -
Is Anybody Outside of SEO Industry Getting ROI from Google+ ?? Tell the truth!
I have been watching Google+ and see lots of SEOs sharing ideas and enjoying their circles. However, I have not seen anything outside of the webmaster community that I would hold up as an example of business engagement - and certainly nothing that seems to be producing a good ROI for a business. It seems to me that everyone outside of the webmaster community is on FaceBook and doesn't give a hoot about Google+. And, since FaceBook has the massive amount of people why should I open an outpost in the poorly populated Google+? I am not looking for Google+ evangelist answers. Just looking to hear if anybody anywhere has found Google+ to be a better use of their time than FaceBook and working on your website. I do believe that using Google+ as an author verification platform is a good use of your time if you have valuable content - mainly because it helps your visibility in the SERPs. Beyond that I am looking for validation. Anybody want to point to something good happening or telling a success story? Thanks!
Social Media | | EGOL8 -
How does Google measure FB likes?
Hi, I am wondering how an FB like made on a webpage can have a positive impact in its Google rankings. How does Google measure an FB like of a Person (especially with a non public profile)? Kind Regards, Sebastian
Social Media | | Naturalmente0 -
Google+'s +1 for business....
I'm thinking (and I could be wrong) that eventually the number of people that have +1'd a site will begin to impact search results. After all, it is Google's platform. What are your thoughts on this? And do you know if having someone +1 your site is different than having them "follow" you or add you to their circles? Should a business have more followers or +1's?
Social Media | | juliaritz0 -
Google analytics now showing social signals
Looking through Google analytics today and noticed that there is a section under top content that shows number of Facebook likes & shares, tweets, diggs, delicious book marks, etc. Anyone else seeing this? [staff note: see answers, this came from a Chrome extension]
Social Media | | prima-2535090