Google penalty
-
Anyone have any success stories on what they did to get out of Google penalty?
-
I have been directly involved in assisting sites recover from manual and algorithmic penalties. I believe most providers of SEO services have this experience as well. Penalties are a common driver or business for our industry.
I did not intend to upset you in any way. My only thoughts regarding your reply were:
-
if you have knowledge about an SEO topic, please share it. If you feel you have discovered a solution, it would be helpful to let others know about it in the Q&A section. You can even write a YouMoz article if you desire which can yield positive credit and attention.
-
generally speaking, taking months to recover from a penalty would be crippling to most businesses. I always strive to work with clients to balance their traffic, but when I first receive clients they often show 85%+ of their traffic comes from Google. If they were to lose that traffic for 60+ days many would go out of business.
I am glad to hear you were able to resolve the issues on your site.
Best Regards,
-Ryan
-
-
Wow that is a horrible analogy. You really think fixing a computer and getting a website out of a Google penalty is the same thing or even close to being similar?
You act like I am trying to sell a service here or something. I am just providing information on the fact that I was actually successful.
It took a while for me to make the changes on the site because I had no idea what to change. We bought this site and it had a Google penalty... so I had to go through the site to figure out what could be wrong. Then went through it and tried to clean it up.
I came on here to find out if anyone has gone through the process of actually getting a site out of a Google penalty, but no one said they did. I do realize in Internet marketing, many people like to talk about how to do stuff, but very few actually do it.
Feel free to tell me that I am doing something wrong or my claims are false... but I am just telling the facts of what happen in my case... whether you feel its "troubling" is your problem.
Bottom line is after I finished making changes on the site sometime in July, 2 months later Google rankings have skyrocketed. I dont know what is so troubling about that.
-
I find your reply quite troubling. It should not take 2-3 months to remove a penalty. It should not require dozens of changes either. Not for a "good" site which has went astray.
If you have a pc that doesn't work and a tech says "hey, I spent a couple weeks working on it, replaced the motherboard, video card, sound card, memory, hard drive, and some other parts, and now it works" is that really an approach you wish to duplicate?
In my case after I made all the changes it took about 2-3 months for Google to make the changes on their end. So dont expect things to happen overnight.
If a site has been penalized, the first thing which needs to be determined is whether it is an algorithmic penalty or a manual penalty. The overwhelming majority of penalties are algorithmic in nature, and those can be fixed overnight. It could take weeks depending on the site, but it should not take months.
-
Figured I would update this... I made a lot of changes to the site before I placed this post on seomoz. Basically gave up on the site at the time I wrote this.
Spent about 2 months making changes trying to figure out what Google didnt like.
About a week ago I guess all the changes finally kicked in and traffic from Google has increased over 900%.
My original reason for posting this was to find someone who actually got a site out of the Google penalty. So if someone is reading this with a Google penalty, contact me and I will try to help.
In my case after I made all the changes it took about 2-3 months for Google to make the changes on their end. So dont expect things to happen overnight.
-
Google has some good information about what it looks for in quality sites at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html.
Of particular interest to ads is the statement "Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?"
-
There are times when Google notifies you in the messages area regarding things that it has noticed that are not in their guidelines (as an example, see this post on Search Engine Roundtable at http://www.seroundtable.com/google-link-spam-notifications-13652.html).
Can you share any information you have about knowing you have a penalty as opposed to the algorithm having changed?
-
We run other sites with 5+ ad units that dominate the search engines for their theme... and Google actually sends emails to add more ad units.
I will try this though and see what happens.
-
Where in webmaster tools does it provide info on a penalty? Never seen that.
-
Ironically enough your site has a page on how to unblock websites: http://monsterguide.net/how-to-unblock-websites
(That page is actually related to individual users, but I noticed it and couldn't help but mention it).
You need to remove all ads from the site. Your not only offer ads, but they are at the top of your left sidebar, right side bar, main content and in the header. Users are blasted with 4 ad blocks the moment they land on a page. They would be the first thing any Google employee or human will notice when reviewing your site, and they offer a most unpleasant user experience.
I am not an expert on AdSense but it seems your page violates Google's AdSense rules. That would explain if your AdSense account was banned, but the Spam team could take action by pulling your site from Google's index, and then notify (or not) the AdSense team. https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=48182&sourceid=aso&subid=ww-ww-et-asui&medium=link&hl=en_US
"AdSense for content: Up to three ad units and three link units may be placed on each page."
Once your penalty has been removed you can replace some ads, but it is not reasonable to have that many ads. I am quite sure Google does not wish their ads to be displayed in such a manner.
Another concern is your site offers many followed links to other sites. If you link to another site which violates Google's terms and they receive a penalty, your site can be affected.
You really need to step back and look at your site's pages. Does the pages in their present condition offer any value to the internet? Would any user say "I am glad to have found this site"? Or are they more likely to run from the site never to return?
-
Hi Phatride,
Have you verified the site in Google Webmaster Tools and in Bing's Webmaster Tools? The webmaster tools will often give you information about any penalty, and let you submit a reconsideration request.
I'm seeing many pages indexed, which is a good sign. A not-so-good sign is that the article on How to Pluck a Chicken was categorized under Games, and has at least five separate ad blocks on it, some with multiple ads. The sheer number of ads may be an issue.
How do you know that you are still penalized?
-
We bought some websites and we knew one of them had a penalty on it. Went through and took out all duplicate content and still nothing. It is on Wordpress.
The penalty started last summer. The other company has no clue what happened. They didnt do much in terms of SEO.
The site is monsterguide . net
If anyone has any ideas that would be great.
Things we have done were... got rid of all language pages, blocked search results, blocked basic wordpress folders, they had image galleries setup so each image was being indexed as its own page, that is now fixed, put canonical links on all pages.
Really appreciate any help.
-
We had a client that picked up a penalty just after Panda and it ended up being for duplicate content. Funny thing was, they had been around for about 8 years and the content itself was also about 3 years old and had been scraped, copied, stolen and reproduced on several other sites in and out of the UK.
We contacted all of these people but also just rewrote the content and then, like magic, they were back again.
Point being - there are so many things that can cause a penalty. A hacked site, ripped off content, dodgy practices or SEO that for us to advise, is pretty much impossible without a link.
Hope it helps and fire over a link for some more targeted feedback.
Cheers
Marcus -
Dejan SEO website was done about a year ago.
It took us weeks to detect the problem and it was finally discovered once Google Webmaster Tools updated. It suggested that most of our content contained words "serial number, adobe, crack...etc". Upon inspection we found that we were hacked and a cloaking script was installed showing pirated software to Google and clean site to users. The links were visible in the source of the cached page.
We cleaned up the site and did 301 from dejan.com.au to dejanseo.com.au
(this was not needed, but I wanted to do it for branding anyway)Back in the results within a week.
-
Marcus is dead on. If you earned a penalty, figure out what you did wrong and fix it. It really is that simple.
-
Hey, some more info would help us put a solution together that best suits your requirements but... in a nutshell - remove all the things you did wrong.
- Built lots of bad, bad, links? - remove them
- got loads of duplicate or weak content - improve it
Anything you have done that earnt the penalty needs to be fixed and you will be okay (eventually, hopefully).
Hope it helps.
Marcus
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 Not Picking Up Posts
I am trying to work out why from March 4th Google is not seeing my posts. Our google impressions have dropped from 8,000 to 40. If you put in the full article name with speach marks it does not find it, and instead shows the home page in google. We have not had any warnings. We did have work done on our site but nothing else i could think of to cause this. Can anyone let me know what may have caused this. All articles are original
Technical SEO | | headlinesplus0 -
Google not Indexing images on CDN.
My URL is: https://bit.ly/2hWAApQ We have set up a CDN on our own domain: https://bit.ly/2KspW3C We have a main xml sitemap: https://bit.ly/2rd2jEb and https://bit.ly/2JMu7GB is one the sub sitemaps with images listed within. The image sitemap uses the CDN URLs. We verified the CDN subdomain in GWT. The robots.txt does not restrict any of the photos: https://bit.ly/2FAWJjk. Yet, GWT still reports none of our images on the CDN are indexed. I ve followed all the steps and still none of the images are being indexed. My problem seems similar to this ticket https://bit.ly/2FzUnBl but however different because we don't have a separate image sitemap but instead have listed image urls within the sitemaps itself. Can anyone help please? I will promptly respond to any queries. Thanks
Technical SEO | | TNZ
Deepinder0 -
Google authorship what am i doing wrong
Hi, i am using google authorship on my site but when i use the testing tool it is not working. before the upgrade we had it working fine but now it does not seem to work. we have our google plus account pointing to the site and the writer we are trying to add is not coming up on the tool here is the code we are putting on the page Google+ and the page in question is here http://www.in2town.co.uk/emmerdale/emmerdale-laurel-is-determined-to-take-action when i check the tool i get the following Authorship Testing ResultAuthorship is not working for this webpage.andAuthorship rel=author MarkupCannot verify that rel=author markup has established authorship for this webpage.the tool i am using to check is http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippetsany help to solve this problem would be great. i am using joomla
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Google Places, Google Plus, Oh my!
Ok - So I am in the position to try and clean up the current Google places nightmare for a company. Right now there is about 3 or 4 different google places listings for them that they have no control over. So here is what I did: 1. I took control of them all by verifying via phone and confirmed all of them. 2. I suspended all the listings but 1 3. I edited the one listing to be accurate and complete.
Technical SEO | | DylanPKI
Then I waited, and waited... A month later, the old listings are still up and none of the changes to the one listing have been made. Today it gets a bit more complicated. Today I created a Google+ page for the business which seems like it may end up adding yet ANOTHER Google Places listing, is that correct? They are sending a post card to verify, but I have the page all set up ready to go and plan on tying it to the website. I am not exactly sure what my specific question is, but I am looking for any advice anyone has on the best way to go about this situation. Thank you in advance!0 -
Does 301 redirect cause penalty
Good Morning, I am considering doing a 301 (permanent) re-direct of roughly 100 domains, split between my 3 main e-commerce sites. Would taking an action like this put any of the 100 domains or any of the 3 recipient domains at risk of violating G's guidelines? Thanks...
Technical SEO | | Prime851 -
Google Alerts News Images
I have a Google Alert setup which is pulling information from a blog. I am receiving images as part of the alert. The issue that I am having is that the images have nothing to do with the blog post. Is there a way to control what images are received in the alert. From what I have gathered, if it grabs an image it should be part of the blog post.
Technical SEO | | ricknakao0 -
What else: struggling with google position
Hi. I understand everyone is offering their time for free here so any advice or support is much appreciated. http://www.cytronex.com
Technical SEO | | AdamJamesCytronex
PA 44 || mR 4.6 || mT 5.73 || 986 links from 43 Root Domains
DA 33 || 3,942 links from 71 Domains We've dropped from position 25ish to position 70ish in keyword searches for 'electric bikes'. I've tried everything and I just don't understand! It's genuine content, the actual product is increasingly popular, we have several links from sites which are (well, to my mind) reasonable quality. I've only just been brought in to look at this and my lack of any SEO or web experience is not putting my boss off expecting an instant solution 😞 As I'm only just getting to grips with it, Analytics was only installed about a month ago so I can't pin point a moment when it dropped. We're consistently out-positioned by sites with lower PA/DA scores. Any insight anyone might have would be amazing! Thanks
Adam0 -
Google Pake Rank of Zero?
Hi! We've been running our website www.opzeggen.nl for a while now, but we still have a google page rank of 0. Searching for a keyword like 'opzeggen' does give us good ranking however. Should I be worried about this? And if so, is there a way to fix this? Best Regards, Pieter
Technical SEO | | greenonline0