Confirmation of penalty
-
Hi,
I have been discussing with friends about possible penalties on few domains [listed below]. I would appreciate if any of seomoz staff could check them and explain if these sites are penalized in full, or part of these websites are penalized or homepage being penalized, any identification of penalty being imposed, and how to get these sites restored.
keyword searched=123businesslistings.com
-
Claudio,
To get a definite answer to your question, simply go to Google Webmaster Tools and send a reconsideration request.
They will notify you if you are still penalized or there was no action taken on your account.
-
The site won't load for me either. Out of 10 attempts, I did get one page to load (but couldn't repeat it.) When it did load I saw that the toolbar PR was N/A. That's often not a good sign.
However, you've still got 773,000 pages in the index so you are not deindexed.
The one page that I saw simply had a business address and was no different than, say, a dmoz scraper site. If the site doesn't add value other than just listing information that is available elsewhere on the web then there is a good chance that it not going to rank well. Many sites like this are affected by Panda.
Do you have WMT set up? This can tell you a lot such as whether or not Googlebot is having trouble accessing your site.
You don't have many links so I don't think it is a link penalty.
-
SEO Audit Checklist:
- Does homepage load?
Seriously though, given the seeming instability of the site my first port of call would be Google and Bing webmaster tools as the site, or homepage oddly enough is currently unavailable.
Beyond that, your site seemingly has 776,000 indexed pages (site: search so approx) so a penalty audit is no five second job.
What makes you suspect a penalty? Can you provide any more info?
Marcus
-
could be somethingto do with not being able to load your homepage to start with
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
-
Recovering from a Google penalty
Hi there, So about 3.5 weeks ago I noticed my website (www.authenticstyle.co.uk) had gone from ranking in second place for our main key phrase "web design dorset" to totally dropping off the SERP's for that particular search phrase - it's literally no where to be seen. It seems that other pages of my website still rank, but the homepage. I then noticed that I had an unread alert in my Google Search Console account to say that a staging site we were hosting on a subdomain (the subdomain was domvs.authenticstyle.co.uk) had hacked content - it was a couple of PDF files with weird file names. The strange thing is we'd taken this staging site down a few weeks earlier, BUT one of my staff had left an A record set up in our Cloudflare account pointing to that staging server - they'd forgotten to remove it when removing the staging site. I then removed the A record, myself and submitted a reconsideration request on Google Search Console (which I still haven't received confirmation of) in the hope of everything sorting itself out. Since then I've also grabbed a Moz Pro account to try and dig a little deeper, but without any success. We have a few warnings for old 404's, some missing meta descs on some pages, and some backlinks that have accumulated over time that have hghish spam rating, but nothing major - nothing that would warrant a penalty as far as I can tell. From what I can make out, we've been issued a penalty on our homepage only, but I don't understand why we would get penalised for hacked content if that site domvs.authenticstyle.co.uk no longer existed (would it just be due to that erroneous A record we forgot to remove?). I contacted a few freelance SEO experts and one came back to me saying I'd done everything correctly and that I should see our site appearing again in a few days after submitting the reconsideration request. Its been 3 weeks and nothing. I'm at a huge loss as to how my site can recover from this. What would you recommend? I even tried getting our homepage to rank for a variation of "web design dorset", but it seems our homepage has been penalised for anything with "dorset" in the keyphrase. Any pointers would be HUGELY appreciated. Thanks in advance! Will
Technical SEO | | wsmith7270 -
Fetch as Google temporarily lifting a penalty?
Hi, I was wondering if anyone has seen this behaviour before? I haven't! We have around 20 sites and each one has lost all of its rankings (not in index at all) since the medic update apart from specifying a location on the end of a keyword. I set to work trying to identify a common issue on each site, and began by improving speed issues in insights. On one site I realised that after I had improved the speed score and then clicked "fetch as google" the rankings for that site all returned within seconds. I did the same for a different site and exactly the same result. Cue me jumping around the office in delight! The pressure is off, people's jobs are safe, have a cup of tea and relax. Unfortunately this relief only lasted between 6-12 hours and then the rankings go again. To me it seems like what is happening is that the sites are all suffering from some kind of on page penalty which is lifted until the page can be assessed again and when it is the penalty is reapplied. Not one to give up I set about methodically making changes until I found the issue. So far I have completely rewritten a site, reduced over use of keywords, added over 2000 words to homepage. Clicked fetch as google and the site came back - for 6 hours..... So then I gave the site a completely fresh redesign and again clicked fetch as google, and same result. Since doing all that, I have swapped over to https, 301 redirected etc and now the site is completely gone and won't come back after fetching as google. Uh! So before I dig myself even deeper, has anyone any ideas? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | semcheck11 -
Do people recover from an unnatural outbound links penalty?
Dear Friends I received an unnatural outbound links penalty on 4th of June 2016. I immediately acted on it, and analysed a lot of outbound links and removed most of them. I had to file reconsideration 2 times, but on 26th of June my penalty was revoked.However, traffic drop was even worse 27th June onwards and it is still dropping. Now, i dont know why the traffic is dropping. Any idea how much time it takes to come back from an unnatural outbound link penalty? PHd8BzX.png
Technical SEO | | marketing910 -
Has anyone had their Google manual spam penalty lifted without notice?
In June of this year, our company submitted a reconsideration request, which Google rejected and confirmed that they had a manual spam penalty placed on us. After cleaning up our extensive link portfolio, we submitted our 2nd reconsideration at the end of this month (July) and received this response: Dear site owner or webmaster of domain, We received a request from a site owner to reconsider domain 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 Has anyone else or their clients experienced this recently? Can this be attributed to the "softer" Panda update? Any other additional information is greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | eugeneku0 -
Do I have a manual penalty?
My rankings and traffic suddenly went down about 50% around the end of Feb 2013. I never received any warnings in webmaster tools (and as far as I know never did anything even vaguely black hat) but thought it might be a penalty since the drop was so steep and as far as I know there were no major algo updates at the time. I sent a reconsideration request expecting to receive an answer that I have no manual penalty. Instead, I received the following email: We received a request from a site owner to reconsider how we index the following site: http://www.sitename.com/. We've now reviewed your site. When we review a site, we check to see if it's in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines. If we don't find any problems, we'll reconsider our indexing of your site. If your site still doesn't appear in our search results, check our Help There have been no changes in my rankings. Does this reply mean that I have/had a manual penalty?
Technical SEO | | JillB20130 -
Noindex duplicate content penalty?
We know that google now gives a penalty to a whole duplicate if it finds content it doesn't like or is duplicate content, but has anyone experienced a penalty from having duplicate content on their site which they have added noindex to? Would google still apply the penalty to the overall quality of the site even though they have been told to basically ignore the duplicate bit. Reason for asking is that I am looking to add a forum to one of my websites and no one likes a new forum. I have a script which can populate it with thousands of questions and answers pulled direct from Yahoo Answers. Obviously the forum wil be 100% duplicate content but I do not want it to rank for anyway anyway so if I noindex the forum pages hopefully it will not damage the rest of the site. In time, as the forum grows, all the duplicate posts will be deleted but it's hard to get people to use an empty forum so need to 'trick' them into thinking the section is very busy.
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Is there a penalty for linking to sites that are all hosted on the same IP address?
Hi... We're doing some reciprocal link building and a gentleman has been kind enough to offer me sever additional links for the exchange. All of them (5) are on the same IP address as one of his links to which we have already linked. They are in a related field of endeavor, legal websites. If I make the swap with him, is Google going to disregard, penalize or otherwise marginalize my efforts? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | hornsbylaw0 -
Duplication Penalty through Specs?
I am trying to figure our how to correct a recently incurred duplication penalty on a partner site. I didn't see any posts on this yet specific to my problem. The site used to be ranked on page 1 of Google for all important keywords but now we ran into the situation that many pages were bumped to pos 100 or lower due to duplication issues. This is an aviation site, discussing airplanes and each page discusses a different model but each page also has the specs of the plane and while the data parts are different for each plane the specification terms are the same ,see here: Primary Function:
Technical SEO | | WizardHQ
Crew:
Engine:
Thrust:
Weight Empty:
Max. Weight:
Length:
Wingspan:
Cruise Speed:
Max.Speed:
Climb:
Ceiling:
Range:
First Flight:
Year Deployed: Is there an easy way to get Google to stop including these terms (not the data in the 2nd column) from the page anaysis to prevent this causing the duplication issues we are are seeing due to this? Thanks in advance!0