Penalized?
-
In late November, our site experienced a dramatic loss in serps across several pages. Since this time, we have been trying all sorts of recommendations that included adding the +1 button, adding Facebook like button, differentiation link types and so on. At the time that all of this happened we also noticed a few problems in GWT concerning inaccessible pages, pages not found and other problems. We have come really close to fixing all of the technical problems, our pages load quickly and have even added the +1 buttons. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any improvement. Now people are saying that when our site was built, about 5-years ago, the url's had keywords stuffed into them. Admittedly, they are long but from what I have read making a series of redirects may not be an optimal solution and will take a long time to see any potential benefits.
All of the listed url's in the image below have been on the first page in google for the listed search phrase. While they are still indexed, they are very difficult to find.
I would like to solicit the help from people with real world experience in diagnosing a problem like this one? Is this an offsite problem, onsite problem, hosting issue or something else?
Thank you
-
It wasn't really all or nothing. Most of these were near the top of the second page or somewhere near the middle of the second page. They all sort of entered the first page one after the other. I'm not really sure if anything was done off page to cause this sort of penalty. We do try to build links but I don't know if some of these were looked at as bad links or if some lost a lot of value. I know that at the time the drop took place we did have some technical problems with our site that took a while to fix. I can't say for sure if those problems cause the penalty either. Aside from doing a lot of SEO in-house we also have a low cost provider and they assured us that all of their activities were legit.
I know we have some bad links that were mostly due to scrapers who stole some of our content, re-wrote it and left a portion of our URL on a page. I think this sort of thing happens to all sites. The vast majority of our links should be good though. WMT tools shows that we have a little over 220,000 links to our pages.
-
For starters i would suggest redirecting those very very very keyword spamming url's to more user friendly urls:
french-translation.html or something.
From you analytics picture-> all out of nothing your visitors dubble and out of nothing they drop? Something you did prehaps?
-
@serge: does a high keyword density penalise your rankings? I used to make sure i was at 2-5%....
-
That would be great!
Thank you
-
Jenadams,
I see some issues from the beginning but I don't see that they would drop traffic like that. I can take a closer look next weekends when I have some time. If it helps my skype is in my profile.
Regards,
Serge
-
Here is a link that still maintains good positioning.
-
Here is a link that still maintains good positioning.
-
By the way, THANK YOU for helping. What else do you think it is? I realize Panda had a freshness update, but the other sites that we compete with never change their content. We had some technical problems but for the most part, they have been fixed.
-
We have a lot of other pages that still maintain top 5 listings. Here is one example:
-
I don't think that the problem is only in url.
What do you mean only several pages were affected?
graphs.php?domain=themarketinganalysts.com&db=us&type=1&w=300&h=200&lc=e43011&dc=e43011&l=en
-
But is this is true then why aren't all of our pages affected? Furthermore, the seomoz tools for suggest that the French page earns an "A". Furthermore, from what I have read, it doesn't make much sense to change up a URL because the improvements are very substantial. Any thoughts?
-
Don't worry about facebook or g +1's, you have a major problem with website. It looks like your traffic droppped big time right after one of panda's updates.
You have a lot of duplicate content pages, links are very long, some pages have very high keyword density and so on.
I would suggest to order a full technical and seo audit from professionals.
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
-
Does google will see this has a 301 permanent redirect and will penalized my website?
Hi, I got a website that have a lot of information on job posting. The domain name will be new but i just want to redirect all of the old single job pages (around 300 pages). To the new domain pages but keep the old domain because it's already been indexed by google. The design will change but the content will kinda be the same. Is this a good approach? Does google will see this has a 301 permanent redirect and will penalized my website? Thanks alot
Link Building | | bigrat950 -
Can internal links cause Google to penalize me for key terms/phrases?
For example, having a link on many pages (so dozens of links in total) using a product name, all pointing to that product page. Could Google see that as "spammy" and penalize that product page in the SERP's? Note: My product page has been penalized for the search term "Product Name" and there are no external links pointing that page using the product name as a term. This is new with the latest Panda Updates.
Link Building | | absoauto0 -
Is hotvsnot penalized?
Been doing some searches for this directory, we have used them for quite a few links and now it seems as though they do not show up in serps for branded terms and the actual "www.hotvsnot.com" search phrase. Scary! Have a look let me know if you are having the same issue ladies and gents.
Link Building | | waqid2 -
Linking to sites that link to porn or casinos, my site getting penalized?
I have some link exchanges with some sites to get web traffic but when i ran the bad neighborhood link checker, i found that one site links to some casinos and another site has one link to a porn site. Is this getting me penalized? should i remove the links to these sites? Thanks, Ron
Link Building | | Ron100 -
Redirecting a penalized domain to a new one to remove penalty?
I've got this website that has been hit quite hard by the first Penguin update round. Would it be better to move all my content to another domain and do a 301 redirect? Or should I keep the penalized domain and try to clean up the bad link profile? Also I must say that the website has been hacked last fall and the hacker was able to upload porn stuff in one of the folders. Needless to say, I quickly acquired tons of links from porn and warez. And no, porn and warez has nothing to do with my website's topic. Thank you for your help! Stephane
Link Building | | sbrault740 -
Can a sitewide backlink with exact anchor text penalize my website?
A few years ago, I exchanged a link with another website. In the meantime, this other website grew quite fast and now they just added a forum. The backlink from their website is sitewide and is using the anchor text "best web hosting". According to Google, this backlink now appears on 117,000 pages of the same domain. Yesterday, I just got a warning from Google: "We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines..." Could that sitewide link be one of the causes? Of course I know there are tons of bad links to my site but I'm wondering if I should get this one removed. Thank you for your help and sorry for my english. Stephane
Link Building | | sbrault740 -
So i have the pleasure of being hit by a big G penalization
I noticed a pretty drastic drop in rankings 2 weeks ago after shelling out £7500 to a UK seo company for 5 months work. I went with this company because they had showed very good results with the number one position company in an equally tough niche. So my rankings across the board dropped, i think 12 out of my 16 tracked keywords had dropped 10+ places or more. I immediately questioned what the hell they had been doing and was told that they were writing blog posts (which i knew about) to rank for category specific pages, but the linking method was using snippets of those blog posts to get links (which i did not know about) I was always told at the beginning that they have never given link reports and never will. Had i of known the links that were being built and they literally were the only type of link i would never have gone with them. Since then i have taken on an established member from the SEOmoz community and we have actioned a plan to go through all links and request removal from all bad sites. (in webmaster tools i have this message)
Link Building | | imrubbish
"Dear site owner or webmaster of imrubbish.co.uk, We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines.Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you've made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google's search results.If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.Sincerely,Google Search Quality Team" superb news! 😞 my new SEO guy is dealing with the bad links, but i do think i have content issues, my real question is how do i weed out the bad content and should i just delete them? leave them as they are and create new better posts? make them better? I must have nearly 100 blog posts and a lot of the early ones were wrote by someone whose English is definitely a second language. Would appreciate all your thoughts. Thanks guys0 -
Google penalizing sites because of press release pages?
Does anyone know of situations i can look up where Google penalized a site because of press release pages (hosted on a non owned major site like prweb or whatever), where the prweb page obtained back links from a group of sites that Google felt was part of a "farm"?
Link Building | | joemas990