Do Google Always Tell You About Penalties?
-
Hi
One of my clients has recently suffered a big decline in rankings on some of their keywords, going from positions in the top 10 to sub 50 for some of their keywords, but not all. Their website is still indexed and there is no link warning from Google. Some of their links from a previous link builder are dodgy and we have already tried to contact the other company for removal but to no avail.
Any ideas where I start? So far I planning to increase the branded anchor link and add some content as the site is fairly light on content. Is it worth doing a reconsideration request and mention the bad links incase this is the problem. Has anyone seen any particular good resources on what to do when it appears you have a penalty. None of my other clients have been effected by Panda or Penguin and although I have done some general reading I need to know what action to take and get up to speed FAST!
Thanks in advance.
Kind regards
Karen
-
Penalty can be limited and i have seen websites that drop its ranking for few keywords or few areas of the website got hit by the update! so its fairly possible!
-
Thanks so much for taking the time to respond, I saw a decline in traffic on Saturday so likely to be the latest Panda update. I just thought a penalty would result in a penalty for all keyword rankings not just some. I will try the reconsideration request, check out Majestic SEO links and see what happens and build more quality content in the meantime.
Kind regards
Karen
-
That right check when the traffic has dropped and then the current changes in the website (if done any) if there is nothing major has been changed on your website and dates where the traffic has been dropped is close to the Panda or Penguin update then you are one of the millions of culprit.
Check your Google webmaster tools and see if you see any link request and if not then you have to get in to doggy links and remove then and tell Google about it... If you will be way to lucky your website will come up in rankings or otherwise you have to delete as many doggy links as possible and build as many high quality links as possible.
To see your complete link profile try and get the links from Majestic SEO, Google Webmaster Tool or more and if you are good with budget then try and use the Link Removal software to spot and remove as many bad links as possible.
Hope this helps!
-
First look at the Analytics, and try to determine when exactly the drop in traffic happened. If it coincides with a known panda or penguin update, then you probably found your problem.
If no luck there, I'd do the reconsideration request but don't mention anything about bad links. You'll get a reply of either "no manual spam actions" or "please remove more bad links and try again"
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 Sitemap - How Long Does it Take Google To Index?
We have changed our sitemap about 1 month ago and Google is yet to index it. We have run a site: search and we still have many pages indexed but we are wondering how long does it take for google to index our sitemap? The last sitemap we put up had thousands of pages indexed within a fortnight, but for some reason this version is taking way longer. We are also confident that there are no errors in this version. Help!
Technical SEO | | JamesDFA0 -
Google Penalty Investigation
Hi All, I've recently had a google penalty, and have spent a long while working through tying up any loose ends with my site (I'm building a new one, so you'll still see some probs on my current one). My search referrals do slowly seem to be recovering, but only for variations of terms that are similar to 'bike repair'. Now, my site does primarily offer bike repair advice, so that's a good thing, but I'm not yet ranking for any of my specific keywords. One example is that I used to rank quite high for the term 'schrader valve'. Is this a signal of anything in particular? Or can I not read anything specific into this? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | madegood0 -
How to optimize for different google seach center (google.de, google.ch) ?
We all use Deutsch language and (.com) domains for the sites. I ranked well in google.com ,but not so well in google.de , google.ch , my competitors ranked much better in google.de,google.ch. I checked most of their outbound-links, but get few information. Links from (.DE) domains or links from sites located in German help the rank for special google seach center ? (google.de, google.ch) . Or some other factors i missed? please help.
Technical SEO | | sunvary0 -
Google bot notification
Hi there! I've just made some changes in my website in order to optimize it but I don't know if there's a way to notify the googlebot that some aspects of the configuration (metas) have changed and must be "taken into account". The spider visited my site two days ago and obviously processed the sitemap file. I've heard that it's possible to do a ping to certain websites. Is this the way to proceed? I must say that there're not many updates in the site (just one way information) as the social media activity is still low. Thanks in advanced.
Technical SEO | | juanmiguelcr0 -
How is Google finding our preview subdomains?
I've noticed that Google is able to find, crawl and index preview subdomains we set up for new client sites (e.g. clientpreview.example.com). I know now to use "meta name="robots" and robots.txt) to block the search engines from crawling these subdomains. My question though, is how is Google finding these subdomains? We don't link to these preview domains from anywhere else, so I can't figure out how Google is even getting there. Does anybody have any insight on this?
Technical SEO | | ZeeCreative0 -
Google Rewriting PDF Titles
Has anyone else noticed Google rewriting the title of PDF documents?
Technical SEO | | waynekolenchuk0 -
Pages not indexed by Google
We recently deleted all the nofollow values on our website. (2 weeks ago) The number of pages indexed by google is the same as before? Do you have explanations for this? website : www.probikeshop.fr
Technical SEO | | Probikeshop0 -
"Site Suspended" in Google Adwords + Lost all rankings in Google => is this related?
Can anyone share thoughts on this: Does the S recently (mid april) we revamped our website (same content, new layout, strong brand), but a few days later our google rep contacted us to tell that she got a "red flag" for one of our SEA campaigns (we broke the bridge page policy, not on purpose to be clear), they were completely correct on this matter. We even got some extra time to correct this, normal policy is only 10 days. But, we were a little slow, so all our Adwords Campaigns are suspended and we get the message "Site suspended". We are working to have this fixed, our Google rep even granted some more time to fix this. Now, almost simultaneously, same time frame, all our new pages, that were already ranking well tx to proper 301 rules, suddenly fell out of the google SERPS, nothing to be found anymore up till now. Our website is live since 1996, no issues, up till now. There seems to be a strong correlation to what happened in our SEA and what happened in our SEO can anyone share some info?
Technical SEO | | TruvoDirectories0
