Which SEO companies offer Penalty analysis?
-
I'm having a hard time finding a (good) SEO company which specializes itself in Penalty analysis? Any recommendations?
I only found Bruce Clay, but they charge 8,000$ :)...
-
Keep an eye on the cached version of the page - once it is updated you may see something straight away but I would tend to give it a couple of weeks after the page is crawled.
-
That seems like a good plan. In which timeframe should I expect results (if any)?
-
Hard to say but it smells like algorithmic filtering of sorts - they were picked up for some reason and are now downgraded.
My approach would be to do an experiment, pick one page, totally rewrite it, track it's progress against the other pages.
Always try to apply scientific rigour, change one variable, measure the results, use that information to steer further decisions or inspire further tests and experiments.
-
When I copied & pasted chunks of text in Google & Bing, I did notice that Google showed way more results then Bing. This could also indicate that Google is more tolerant to duplicate content in their index then Bing.
The links you checked were totally removed from the index on Bing a few weeks ago. They are now back in the index, but not (yet) in the top 50. What does that indicate?
-
Hey, not to say there are not other issues, but that is an obvious line of investigation and worth pursuing if only to tick it off the list - a real audit would dig a lot deeper!
As Dr. Marie said, it's an odd one to be Bing specific - that's what piqued my interest!
Good luck!
Marcus -
Hi Marie,
Thank you for the tip. I will definitely check if there aren't too many keywords on the page.
In the theory of Marcus, it could make sense that Google recognizes the original content, while Bing does not recognize us as the original content. Google places us on top, while Bing places us below. This indicates that Bing is using different metrics which are not in my benefit.
I also checked Bing WMT, but no messages.
-
This is an interesting question given that your ranking drop is happening in Bing and not Google. I think this is the first time I have ever heard anyone with that issue.
I don't have the answer for you, but I have one quick thought. Duane Foresster, head of Bing, mentioned a while back that they use keyword stuffing in the meta keywords tag as an indicator of spam. If you've got meta keywords tags in place I would remove them. It probably won't make a huge difference, but it can't hurt.
Also, have you checked your Bing WMT? There may be some clues in there as to what is going on.
-
Okay, quick look at three pages that have dropped from Bing.
If I take a chunk of text from the homepage and google it in double quotes I often find 50 or more pages with the same content. Not a good start but at least your page comes up first indicating that you are at least the owner / originator of the content.
If we do the same in Bing, I am finding your pages, but only after several others with the same content AND bing ranks other sites above your site indicating a problem.
What to do? Well, it depends. How did this content get onto all these other sites? Has it been pinched from your site? If so, you need a content audit and to find any other sites using your content and to ask them to take it down.
You could try some DMCA takedown requests but often, if this is an old site and you have been wildscale plundered I have found rewriting the content is often easier on your site.
As an example, I have a client I have worked with for 10 years or more. We set them up and they have been pretty much ruling the roost in their little niche for years and were the first site to really set up doing what they do we believe.
Well, long before panda or penguin they suddenly dropped out of search and I had a panicked phone call. A bit of digging found literally hundreds of sites all over the world that had copied content, also, some pretty much out and copies of the website (with not all links replaced as well so still pointing to some pages on the source site).
We tried to contact all these folks but in the end just used it as an excuse to freshen up the content and do a rewrite and it bounced back.
Now, not saying you don't have other problems, it was the quickest of quick looks but certainly, this is the direction I would go in.
Hope that helps!
Marcus -
HI Marcus,
No, the pages are 2 to 6 years old.
I will send you a PM with the link now.
Thank you.
-
Hmm, interesting, so are these new pages that rank well and then drop out of search? Again, near impossible to provide any more feedback without a link but feel free to fire me a PM or email and I will feedback here (keeping your anonymity intact)
-
Thank you Tom and Marcus, for your responses. It was really helpful. I value it highly.
Just to be clear, the penalty is on page-level and only on Bing. Weekly I see 1 or 2 pages from my website removed from the index on Bing (page 1 or 2 ranking before). I use the weekly ranking report of Seomoz as an indicator. This has been happening since January. When I go to Bing I indeed can't find the pages that lost the ranking according to Seomoz. They seem totally removed from the search index. Also no messages in Bing Webmaster tools.
I have no idea what is triggering this page-level penalty. So I'm looking for an expert on this matter.
I prefer not to share my website openly.
-
Hey
We specialise in SEO Audits which can cover a range or problems (including penalty analysis) but it can also be something that you can do on your own. Certainly, there is a lot of moving parts and it depends on the complexity of the site, the history and a number of other variables.
So, for starters, can you provide a URL for some feedback? Additionally, can you provide any other details?
- History
- Platform (CMS : WordPress, Magento etc)
- Problems including dates and any additional information
As a starting point that should enable you to get some feedback from the community and the problem may be quite apparent and tied to known dates with algorithm updates.
First up take a look at your analytics and then compare any obvious drops to this:
http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-changeThen, if you find a date that tallies up, take a look at your traffic for two weesk before and after the drop. Check out search terms, landing pages and anything else important to see what was most effected and build a list of terms and pages to start your further analysis.
Then, with http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ you can examine these individual pages and anchor text terms and look for obvious patterns and problems with external elements.
If, it is more of a panda type penalty then you can use services like copyscape to get an idea of what is going on from a duplicate content perspective.
Ultimately, there are so many permutations and possibilities that without a URL and some more info it's near impossible for anyone to give you any more targeted feedback.
Certainly though, if you would like someone to take a look, give me a shout and I can at least give you some quick feedback. Other folks of note from this forum are Ryan from Vitopian and Dr. Marie who are both well versed with penalties and good, honest folks.
Hope that helps
Marcus
-
I imagine quite a few would, even if they do not explicitly mention. If you find a company or agency that you like the look of, it's always worth dropping them a message to see if they would do this service for you.
On that note, have a look at SEOMoz's recommended company list and see if any of those companies offer what you're looking for, or if they have expertise and/or a portfolio with companies in your industry - that's always a good sign.
If you'd like to go down the route of self-diagnosis, I'd highly recommend the Panguin tool and MyTrafficDropped.com. Both are great diagnosis and analysis tools, while also providing you with actionable advice. MyTrafficDropped also provides consultancy for penalty removal.
Hope these links help!
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
-
What does Google's Spammy Structured Markup Penalty consist of?
Hey everybody,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | klaver
I'm confused about the Spammy Structured Markup Penalty: "This site may not perform as well in Google results because it appears to be in violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines." Does this mean the rich elements are simply removed from the snippets? Or will there be an actual drop in rankings? Can someone here tell from experience? Thanks for your help!1 -
.com geotagging redirect to subdomains - will it affect SEO?
Hi guys, We have a .com domain and we've got geoIP on it, so UK goes to .co.uk and USA goes to .com/us We're just migrating over to another platform so we're thinking of keeping a "dummy" server just to do this geoIP pointing for us. Essentially .com will just point over to the right place and hold a specific .com/abc (which is generic for everyone worldwide) Current Scenario:
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Infruition
.com (Magento + geoIP)
.com/us (US Magento)
.co.uk (UK - geoIP redirect to Shopify)
.com/abc (sits on Magento server) Wanted Scenario:
.com - used for GEOIP and a specific .com/abc (for all users)
.co.uk (UK) - Shopify eCom
.com/us -> migration to us.xx.com (USA) - Shopify eCom I just wanted to know if this will affect our rankings on google? Also, any advice as to the best practises here would be great. Thanks! Nitesh0 -
It's possible a bounce-rate attack manipulate SEO?
My site has been visited by unusual users with one second session times. This leaves my analytics data confused.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CompraBit0 -
Looking for a Way to Standardize Content for Thousands of Pages w/o Getting Duplicate Content Penalties
Hi All, I'll premise this by saying that we like to engage in as much white hat SEO as possible. I'm certainly not asking for any shady advice, but we have a lot of local pages to optimize :). So, we are an IT and management training course provider. We have 34 locations across the US and each of our 34 locations offers the same courses. Each of our locations has its own page on our website. However, in order to really hone the local SEO game by course topic area and city, we are creating dynamic custom pages that list our course offerings/dates for each individual topic and city. Right now, our pages are dynamic and being crawled and ranking well within Google. We conducted a very small scale test on this in our Washington Dc and New York areas with our SharePoint course offerings and it was a great success. We are ranking well on "sharepoint training in new york/dc" etc for two custom pages. So, with 34 locations across the states and 21 course topic areas, that's well over 700 pages of content to maintain - A LOT more than just the two we tested. Our engineers have offered to create a standard title tag, meta description, h1, h2, etc, but with some varying components. This is from our engineer specifically: "Regarding pages with the specific topic areas, do you have a specific format for the Meta Description and the Custom Paragraph? Since these are dynamic pages, it would work better and be a lot easier to maintain if we could standardize a format that all the pages would use for the Meta and Paragraph. For example, if we made the Paragraph: “Our [Topic Area] training is easy to find in the [City, State] area.” As a note, other content such as directions and course dates will always vary from city to city so content won't be the same everywhere, just slightly the same. It works better this way because HTFU is actually a single page, and we are just passing the venue code to the page to dynamically build the page based on that venue code. So they aren’t technically individual pages, although they seem like that on the web. If we don’t standardize the text, then someone will have to maintain custom text for all active venue codes for all cities for all topics. So you could be talking about over a thousand records to maintain depending on what you want customized. Another option is to have several standardized paragraphs, such as: “Our [Topic Area] training is easy to find in the [City, State] area. Followed by other content specific to the location
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CSawatzky
“Find your [Topic Area] training course in [City, State] with ease.” Followed by other content specific to the location Then we could randomize what is displayed. The key is to have a standardized format so additional work doesn’t have to be done to maintain custom formats/text for individual pages. So, mozzers, my question to you all is, can we standardize with slight variations specific to that location and topic area w/o getting getting dinged for spam or duplicate content. Often times I ask myself "if Matt Cutts was standing here, would he approve?" For this, I am leaning towards "yes," but I always need a gut check. Sorry for the long message. Hopefully someone can help. Thank you! Pedram1 -
SEO for location outside major city
Hello, I'm hoping to get some opinions on optimising a site for a client based 30 minutes outside of Dublin. Obviously there is a higher search volume for "x in Dublin" than "x in small town". What do you think the best strategies are for incorporating the "Dublin" into keywords? For example is it OK to use phrases like "x near Dublin" or "x in Greater Dublin", or do you think this is a bit misleading? The client in question sells good online, so the customer wouldn't physically have to visit the store. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | gcdtechnologies0 -
Best way to handle SEO error, linking from one site to another same IP
We committed an SEO sin and created a site with links back to our primary website. Although it does not matter, the site was not created for that purpose, it is actually "directory" with categorized links to thousands of culinary sites, and ours are some of the links. This occurred back in May 2010. Starting April 2011 we started seeing a large drop in page views. It dropped again in October 2011. At this point our traffic is down over 40% Although we don't know for sure if this has anything to do with it, we know it is best to remove the links. The question is, given its a bad practice what is the best fix? Should we redirect the 2nd domain to the main or just take it down? The 2nd domain does not have much page rank and I really don't think many if any back-links to it. Will it hurt us more to lose the 1600 or so back links? I would think keeping the links is a bad idea. Thanks for your advice!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | foodsleuth0 -
Anchor text penalty doesn't work?!
How do you think, does the anchortext penalty exactly work? Keyword domains obviously can't over-optimize for their main keyword (for example notebook.com for the keyword notebook). And a lot of non-keyword-domains do optimize especially in the beginning for their main keyword to get a good ranking in google (and it always works). Is there any particular point (number of links) I can reach, optimizing for one keyword, after what i'm gonna get a penalty?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TheLastSeo0 -
How can I make use of multiple domains to aid my SEO efforts?
About an year, the business I work for purchased 20+ domains: sendmoneyfromcanada.com sendmoneyfromaustralia.com sendmoneyfromtheuk.com sendmoneyfromireland.com The list goes on, but you can get the main idea. They thought that the domains can be useful to aid http://www.transfermate.com/ . I can set up a few micro sites on them, but from that point there will be no one to maintain them. And I'm, honestly, not too happy with hosting multiple sites on one IP and having them all link to the flagship. It is spammy and it does not bring any value to end users. I might be missing something, so my question is - Can I use these domains to boost my rankings, while avoiding any shady/spammy techniques? P.S. I had this Idea of auctioning the domains in order to cover for the domain registration fees.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Svetoslav0