Penalized and how to recover
-
Hey guys
One of our sites was penalised from a while ago and we use to rank page 1 for our keywords and now w can't be found. Is there a way to recover from this?
Also, I came across Rands video about site architecture whilst google were teaching us to generate backlinks, and spammy anchor text what would your suggestion be to recover from this? Any ideas?
Here is the site http://free-love-psychic.com/
Any suggestions?
-
It looks like your robots.txt is missing. If you upload one and Google can read it, they will crawl your site. As the message says, further crawls of your site are "postponed" until Google can read a robots.txt file (which is odd, I've never had this on sites without robots.txt before.)
I would suggest uploading & checking your robots file and then requesting a recrawl through WMT.
-
Hi Matt,
Going through google web masters tools, and finding the messages that were sent to me are as follows:
Over the last 24 hours, Googlebot encountered 30 errors while attempting to access your robots.txt. To ensure that we didn't crawl any pages listed in that file, we postponed our crawl. Your site's overall robots.txt error rate is 100.0%.
You can see more details about these errors in Webmaster Tools.
Recommended action If the site error rate is 100%:
Using a web browser, attempt to access http://lovepsychicmary.com/robots.txt. If you are able to access it from your browser, then your site may be configured to deny access to googlebot. Check the configuration of your firewall and site to ensure that you are not denying access to googlebot. If your robots.txt is a static page, verify that your web service has proper permissions to access the file. If your robots.txt is dynamically generated, verify that the scripts that generate the robots.txt are properly configured and have permission to run. Check the logs for your website to see if your scripts are failing, and if so attempt to diagnose the cause of the failure.
If the site error rate is less than 100%:
Using Webmaster Tools, find a day with a high error rate and examine the logs for your web server for that day. Look for errors accessing robots.txt in the logs for that day and fix the causes of those errors. The most likely explanation is that your site is overloaded. Contact your hosting provider and discuss reconfiguring your web server or adding more resources to your website. If your site redirects to another hostname, another possible explanation is that a URL on your site is redirecting to a hostname whose serving of its robots.txt file is exhibiting one or more of these issues.
After you've fixed the problem, use Fetch as Google to fetch http://lovepsychicmary.com/robots.txt to verify that Googlebot can properly access your site.
So not too sure if this could be the issue?
Learn more in our Help Center.
-
There are a number of different penalties so without specifics this can be hard to answer but by far the most common we see is a partial link penalty. Basically, you built some "crap" so Google chooses to ignore it and not give you the value. Usually results in what looks like a full page, 2 page or 5+ page drop. (Keywords that were page 1 drop to 2 or 3, keywords on 2 drop to page 5, etc.)
You would need a link clean up, maybe disavow & reconsideration request if you have this (or the full link based manual penalty.) If you don't have a message in Webmasters Tools, you may also be talking about Penguin - an "algorithmic penalty" (not a true penalty.) If this is what you mean, similar steps will be taken. In either case you will also need to find a way to continue gaining authority. Disavow / recon without authority building won't get you very far.
-
Hi Alec, recovering from a Google penalty is not an easy process unfortunately. And the Q&A section here wouldn't be enough to explain everything as well. I would suggest going over this article on Moz. It is a very thorough article explaining every steps you need to take to remove manual penalties associated with your website. I hope this helps
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
-
Positions dropped and do not recover
Hi all, Site: https://www.fascinators.com.au k/w: fascinators (this is the main one I am looking at) About 2 years ago, I redesigned the site. It used to be on first positions in Google Australia. After redesign, positions dropped and never recovered. No matter what I do, I can not get them back. I even involved professional SEO agency for the last 6 month to help build links, but nothing works. (old site used really old non mobile-friendly engine) As far as I know site is technically sound with no issues. In the last few month position for my main keyword 'fascinators' jumps really wildly. From position 9 to not being in Google first 100. And jump can happen overnight. As of today it disappeared from first 100 again. I am really tearing my hair out on what can be wrong. Link building is underway. This is one area I am aware of. Thinking of keyword spamming, i removed lots of 'fascinators' from URL, but that did not seem to help much. Any ideas will be greatly appreciated! Thanks, Rudolf
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rudolfl1 -
Recovering from spam links on MY site
Hey guys, Having a weird situation and wondering if anybody can help. I run a sizable WordPress site with a number of content writers. One of the writer's accounts was hacked and was used to post several dozens of complete spam posts with spun content and links to all sorts of shady sites. Recently the site has begun losing rankings on all sorts of pages. There's no manual penalty or anything, but I'm concerned that we're being penalized for having had these links on the site. Of course, as soon as we found the content, we immediately removed it, reset passwords, etc. But a decent number of the pages were indexed. Does anybody have any experience with this or ideas of what to do about it? Is there somewhere we can talk to Google about it or some way to show that we are not part of bad neighborhoods? Thanks so much for any thoughts, Yon
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yon230 -
Are we being Penalized? Can someone Assess Please!
We have two eCommerce sites. Both the sites can broadly be divided into 3 pages 1. Home Page. 2. Detail Page. 3 Category Pages (Altogether our site has approx 3 Million pages each) These are the site URLs http://bit.ly/9tRZIi - This is targeted for USA Audience http://bit.ly/P8MxPR - This is targeted for UK audience The .com domain which was launched earlier in 2011 is doing okay with decent organic traffic Precautions Taken: To avoid content being duplicate on both the sites we are using: a. Geo-targeting through Google webmaster tools b. rel=alternate tag on printsasia.co.uk Problem 1. The .co.uk domain which was launched in May 2012 started gaining organic traffic slowly but then suddenly dropped to almost 0 after September 18. 2. When we use operator site:printsasia.co.uk and apply a filter on past week/month we don't see any result. While when same operator used for "any time" we see some results. 3. According to webmaster tool, Google has indexed 95% of our URLs in the sitemap Our concern: Is our UK site penalized for some reasons? If yes, what could be the possible reason(s) for this penalty and possible steps to get out of it? Would request if experts here can review our site and help us.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CyrilWilson0 -
Recovering from an Automatic penalty
My website dropped from ~15 to 500 + for our main keywords in target markets (but are still doing okay in other countries and for other keywords) I cleaned my site up and contacted Google who told me no manual spam actions were taken on my site. The only thing I can think is that we suffered from an automatic penalty (the drop corresponded with a small panda update). If that is in fact what happened, how do we recover? Also feel free to contribute other ideas about what may have occurred.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
Penalized for duplication?
Hi there, In February 2012 one my web pages (.co.uk) dropped from page 1 to page 5 for the keyword 'Menopause' and was replaced with a .PDF Late January 2012 I launched a duplicate version of this webpage however targeting .ie due to difference currency and legalities, I had made sure in webmaster tools that both websites were both Geographically correct, I am also using hreflang tags on both webpages. One thing that is strange is if I copy the first few paragraphs of the webpage in question into Google.co.uk, it's the .ie webpage that appears. Any help would be appreciated in why this has happened. Kind Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Seo advice / plan ? penalized ?
I built an ecommerce site for a client of mine just over 9 months ago now. To begin with the serps were great, everything was listed in the results but for some reason a few weeks in all the results vanished from google and now we're lucky to find anything. I've been as far as page 200 and havent found any results. Its been like this for a solid 8 months so i can only presume that the site has been penalised in some form. Searching for unique phrases from the site doesnt even return results. The website in question is = http://goo.gl/A6Gz2
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gfxpixeldesigns
keywords we're aiming for = coloured contact lenses, fashion contact lenses
Target = Google UK Now im not really an seo guy but regardless of this my client has hired me to see whats going on and correct it. I've been scratching my head thinking all sorts of things but none of which im certain about so i'm looking for someone to point me in the right direction before i do anything drastic. So to begin with here are some of my suspicions which i personally think are affecting ranking and possible penalisation. #1 - Too many links on the page
#2 - Possibly over optimised
#3 - Lack of content on the product and category pages
#4 - Lack of backlinks and links in general coming from other sites My main concern is the lack of links from other sites and the odd link coming from low quality sites. I've also just found out that my client has been using an automatic link submitter which i've always thought of as a big no no. Some of the sites these links have been submitted to have nothing to do with the keyword we are targetting and are sort of spammy sites containing all sorts of links. Im wondering if these poor quality links could have caused the site to be penalised, google may be seeing it as a spammy site due to this. Whats your opinions on the above, are my suspicions correct and can this be recovered ? My planned course of action is to be as follows: #1 - Re write the content currently on the site so that it is better written and include more keywords, especially long tails since i think these will help bring the serps up.
#2 - Write detailed category and product descriptions as well as making sure every page has some well written content with links and keywords.
#3 - Keep the above pages to one main subject / keyword so that google doesnt get confused.
#4 - Get some links on popular and relevant sites, the only problem here is the lack of fashion contact lens sites. Does anyone have any advice on how to find these or where i should be getting links placed. Are directories worth while ?
#5 - Get more involved in the social side ie facebook, twitter I will be building on the above over time, aswell as running google ads moderately for our chosen keywords. Is there anything i have missed, anything i shouldnt be doing. Please advise. Thanks.0 -
Examples of sites other than Hubpages that have used subdomains to recover from Panda?
Everyone knows subdomains worked for Hubpages to recover from Panda. Does anyone know of other examples of sites that have recovered from Panda using subdomains?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Does Google penalize for having a bunch of Error 404s?
If a site removes thousands of pages in one day, without any redirects, is there reason to think Google will penalize the site for this? I have thousands of subcategory index pages. I've figured out a way to reduce the number, but it won't be easy to put in redirects for the ones I'm deleting. They will just disappear. There's no link juice issue. These pages are only linked internally, and indexed in Google. Nobody else links to them. Does anyone think it would be better to remove the pages gradually over time instead of all at once? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Interesting.com0