How can I tell where I was penalised?
-
It seems for sometime now I have not been showing up the top for my keywords when I use to be ranking #1 and #2 for my main keywords, however now, I don't show up anywhere - this has been for almost a year now, can anyone tell me how I can find out (apart from google web masters tools) where I was penalised?
Thanks
-
I personally would start by using the Panguin tool which gives an overlay of your Google Analytics - make sure you set your date back enough to cover the time prior to when you got hit in order to see if you have been hurt by any of the updates. I have been using this tool for several years and would definitely recommend it - I have done in several other Moz Q&As previously.
Samuel Scott's response mentions the post by Alan Bleweiss and he mentions this tool in it.
Depending on what your analysis uncovers you may find this an interesting read - http://moz.com/blog/ultimate-guide-to-google-penalty-removal
Hope this helps!
-
Definitely a good idea to check what pages you set up, when you put them together and compare that to the release of known updates to determine whether there is a correlation. If that isn't possible or is very labor intensive, you might do some research into the strategies and tactics you employed a year ago and make sure that they have not become punishable tactics in 2015 - sounds obvious but you never know.
You might also consider a website audit to see if that might illuminate a previously unknown problem.
Best of luck and feel free to ask follow-up questions if you have any.
Rob
-
This recent in-depth case study that was published on Moz is a great place to start -- seriously, it's amazing!
-
Can you pinpoint the date your site started to slip? then check that against: http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change that might help identify if you were hit by panda/penguin etc
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
-
Alternatives to Bright Edge and other tools which can do this?
Hi guys, Has anyone seen any cheaper alternatives to Bright Edge. Looking for SEO tools which can track keyword rankings, optimization changes, add notes and other data to ensure constant improvements in optimisation. Cheers, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
What can we do to optimize / be mobile-friendly for PDFs?
I'm getting a "Your page is not mobile-friendly." notice in the SERPs for all of our PDFs. I check the pdf on the phone and it appears just fine. rFtLq
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | johnnybgunn0 -
How can I prevent duplicate pages being indexed because of load balancer (hosting)?
The site that I am optimising has a problem with duplicate pages being indexed as a result of the load balancer (which is required and set up by the hosting company). The load balancer passes the site through to 2 different URLs: www.domain.com www2.domain.com Some how, Google have indexed 2 of the same URLs (which I was obviously hoping they wouldn't) - the first on www and the second on www2. The hosting is a mirror image of each other (www and www2), meaning I can't upload a robots.txt to the root of www2.domain.com disallowing all. Also, I can't add a canonical script into the website header of www2.domain.com pointing the individual URLs through to www.domain.com etc. Any suggestions as to how I can resolve this issue would be greatly appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iam-sold0 -
Website penalised can't find where the problem is. Google went INSANE
Hello, I desperately need a hand here! Firstly I just want to say that I we never infracted google guidelines as far as we know. I have been around in this field for about 6 years and have had success with many websites on the way relying only in natural SEO and was never penalised until now. The problem is that our website www.turbosconto.it is and we have no idea why. (not manual) The web has been online for more than 6 months and it NEVER started to rank. it has about 2 organic visits a day at max. In this time we got several links from good websites which are related to our topic which actually keep sending us about 50 visits a day. Nevertheless our organic visita are still 1 or 2 a day. All the pages seem to be heavily penalised ... when you perform a search for any of our "shops"even including our Url, no entries for the domain appear. A search example: http://www.turbosconto.it zalando What I will expect to find as a result: http://www.turbosconto.it/buono-sconto-zalando The same case repeats for all of the pages for the "shops" we promote. Searching any of the brads + our domain shows no result except from "nike" and "euroclinix" (I see no relationship between these 2) Some days before for these same type of searches it was showing pages from the domain which we blocked by robots months ago, and which go to 404 error instead of our optimised landing pages which cannot be found in the first 50 results. These pages are generated by our rating system... We already send requests to de index all theses pages but they keep appearing for every new page that we create. And the real pages nowhere to be found... Here isan example: http://www.turbosconto.it/shops/codice-promozionale-pimkie/rat
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sebastiankoch
You can see how google indexes that for as in this search: site:www.turbosconto.it rate Why on earth will google show a page which is blocked by the robots.txt displaying that the content cannot retrieved because it is blocked by the robots instead of showing pages which are totally SEO Friendly and content rich... All the script from TurboSconto is the same one that we use in our spanish version www.turbocupones.com. With this last one we have awesome results, so it makes things even more weird... Ok apart from those weird issues with the indexation and the robots, why did a research on out backlinks and we where surprised to fin a few bad links that we never asked for. Never the less there are just a few and we have many HIGH QUALITY LINKS, which makes it hard to believe that this could be the reason. Just to be sure we, we used the disavow tool for these links, here are the bad links we submitted 2 days ago: domain: www.drilldown.it #we did not ask for this domain: www.indicizza.net #we did not ask for this domain: urlbook.in #we did not ask for this, moreover is a spammy one http://inpe.br.way2seo.org/domain-list-878 #we did not ask for this, moreover is a spammy one http://shady.nu.gomarathi.com/domain-list-789 #we did not ask for this, moreover is a spammy one http://www.clicdopoclic.it/2013/12/i-migliori-siti-italiani-di-coupon-e.html #we did not ask for this, moreover and is a copy of a post of an other blog http://typo.domain.bi/turbosconto.it I have no clue what can it be, we have no warning messages in the webmaster tools or anything.
For me it looks as if google has a BUG and went crazy on judging our italian website. Or perhaps we are just missing something ??? If anyone could throw some light on this I will be really glad and willing to pay some compensation for the help provided. THANKS A LOT!0 -
What can I do to put these pages back in the top results?
Hello here, here is an interesting question for you. The following 2 webpages from our website have been ranking well on Google (usually on the 1st or 2nd page) for the past 12 years. They are among our oldest, highly relevant product pages on our site: http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/Moonlight.html http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/Eliza.html And we could always find them with the keyword "moonlight sonata sheet music" or "fur elise sheet music". Now, since the last November these pages don't show up anymore despite they are still present in the index. It is pretty hard to understand why those pages don't show up in the search results for those keywords as they used to, above all if you consider that those are among our best, most popular and unique product pages! But instead to struggle to understand why we lost presence (Panda? Some unknown sort of penalization?), has anyone any suggestions to help us to have those pages back in the top results? What do you suggest to do in such kind of cases? Any ideas and thoughts are very welcome! Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Blocking Pages Via Robots, Can Images On Those Pages Be Included In Image Search
Hi! I have pages within my forum where visitors can upload photos. When they upload photos they provide a simple statement about the photo but no real information about the image,definitely not enough for the page to be deemed worthy of being indexed. The industry however is one that really leans on images and having the images in Google Image search is important to us. The url structure is like such: domain.com/community/photos/~username~/picture111111.aspx I wish to block the whole folder from Googlebot to prevent these low quality pages from being added to Google's main SERP results. This would be something like this: User-agent: googlebot Disallow: /community/photos/ Can I disallow Googlebot specifically rather than just using User-agent: * which would then allow googlebot-image to pick up the photos? I plan on configuring a way to add meaningful alt attributes and image names to assist in visibility, but the actual act of blocking the pages and getting the images picked up... Is this possible? Thanks! Leona
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HD_Leona0 -
Can PDF be seen as duplicate content? If so, how to prevent it?
I see no reason why PDF couldn't be considered duplicate content but I haven't seen any threads about it. We publish loads of product documentation provided by manufacturers as well as White Papers and Case Studies. These give our customers and prospects a better idea off our solutions and help them along their buying process. However, I'm not sure if it would be better to make them non-indexable to prevent duplicate content issues. Clearly we would prefer a solutions where we benefit from to keywords in the documents. Any one has insight on how to deal with PDF provided by third parties? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gestisoft-Qc1 -
Can anyone recommend solid directories (paid) to submit websites to?
can anyone recommend solid directories (paid) to submit websites to? maybe a directory you've already submitted to and have gotten results. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PaulDylan0