How to find out if I have been penalized?
-
I have launched a new website beginning January this year and have seen slowly more and more traffic coming from google to the website until the 20th of March where suddenly there are no more visitors from the google search engine. The only traffic left is from google images, social networks or other search engines. Without visitors from google search this reduces our overall traffic by ~66%.
I can't easily find anymore our website in the search results of google by using terms which we usually ranked quite well. Nevertheless, the website is still indexed as I can find it using the "site:" search query. In google webmaster tools there are no messages and we have only been doing a bit of link building on website and blog directories (nothing excessive and nothing paid neither).
Is there any way to find out if google penalized my website? I guess it has... and what would be the best thing to do right now?
The website is hellasholiday (dot) com
Thanks in advance for your idea and suggestions
-
I am not a fan of CMS, i realize there are pros and cons, but when you try to do too much and be all things to all people you tend to have a lot of compromises.
There is one other reason i dont like to use robots,txt, i remeber Matt Cutts saying that it is a spam signal because they can not see what you are hiding, not that it is going to get you flaged by itself, but with other signals it can. If i remember correctly he was talking about hiding malware in scripts blocked by robots.
If you are interested, the best CMS for SEO i had found was Orchard CMS but even that has some silly errors, it puts more then one H1 tag in pages, but is still the best solution I have looked at. It is more customizable via code.
-
After having read your post and all the linked articles you have recommended I understand the issue and have adapted the robots.txt accordingly. Basically only leaving one single Disallow for the WordPress plugins. I hope this will help but I suppose I will see this in the next few days...
Now regarding WordPress I would suggest them to adapt their documentation as it is really misleading. Also I think they should implement all these noindex meta tags where necessary natively into wordpress and not by having to use a plugin for that, but this is another story.
-
Wordpress do many things that are not recommened, and blocking by robots is not recomened, what they are suggesting is a extream messure to solve the softewares problems. there are better ways to solve duplicate content without giveing away your link juice
Read this section "WordPress Robots.txt blocking Search results and Feeds"
on this page http://yoast.com/example-robots-txt-wordpress/
These plug-ins like yoast and word press itself, do not produse very good results. I have crawled many wordpress sites and they all have the same old problems many caused by the yoast plugin.
What google is refereing to in the link, is not getting pages of little value into their index, this is for their advantage not yours.
Its quite simple, if you block a page, the links pointing to that page waste their link juice, if you dont, or at least allow follow with a meta tag, you will get the link juice back.
See this article where Dr Pets calls it an extream messure, search for robots.txt you will see many comments refering to my point http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world
See Dr pets comments here http://www.seomoz.org/blog/serious-robotstxt-misuse-high-impact-solutions
-
I thought it would be no use for google to index and cache small icons, logos and cached resized images which have no meaningful name or so. So now I have at least removed the Disallow for these but for WordPress blog I want to keep the Disallow rules as recommended by WordPress itself for SEO purposes as documented here http://codex.wordpress.org/Search_Engine_Optimization_for_WordPress#Robots.txt_Optimization assuming they know what they are speaking about.
Anyhow I don't have the feeling this is really the problem why my website doesn't show up anymore in the google search engine results...
-
The question should be why block them?
its like cutting off your hand, because you have a splinter.
If duplicate content is a problem, then you can (in order of prefrance) fix it, use a canonical, a noindex,follow meta tag, but not robots
-
Many thanks Alan for your answer!
Regarding the robots.txt, basically I just would like to block/disallow some cached images and small icons/pictures from the website as well as some stuff for the associated WordPress blog which is also host on the same website. For the blog I am disallowing the admin pages, feeds, comments, trackbacks, content theme files etc. Here wold be the complete list just in case:
Disallow /wp-admin
Disallow: /wp-includes
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins
Disallow: /wp-content/cache
Disallow: /wp-content/themes
Disallow: /trackback
Disallow: /feed
Disallow: /comments
Disallow: /category//
Disallow: /*/trackback
Disallow: /*/feed
Disallow: /*/comments
Disallow: /?
Disallow: /*?
So maybe I should change my question to "what URLs should I disallow for a WordPress blog?"
Also where can I see all the pages which are blocked by my robots.txt file?
-
You can ask for reconsideration from google though webmaster tools. But since you have no warnings and you are still in the index, i have doubts that you have been flagegd manualaly, but you may have been algorthmicly.
I notived that you have blokced hundreds of pages with robots.txt, thios had led to thousonds of links pointing to pages that are not indexed, this means these links are puiring away link juice into nowhere.
You should not use robots text to block pages that are linked to, its a waste of valuable link juice.
if you must no-index the pages, use a meta noindex,follow tag, this way you will get most of the link juice back though the pages outlinks
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
-
how to find broken outbound links ?
hey guy, can anyone help me in finding broken outbound link on my website by using moz ? does Moz has this function ?
Technical SEO | | rogerdam0 -
Please help me figure out if my website is penalized? It is not in the search result page for the phrase that is original to it.
I just searched Google for the phrase that is original to my website (yourappliancerepairla.com😞 "LG actually has a very large and well respected home appliances business", and Google didn't bring my website at all. Does this mean that my website is penalized?
Technical SEO | | kirupa0 -
Best tool to find Related keywords with a Keyword provided.
Hi, Best tool to find Related keywords with a Keyword provided. Basically i want to give a keyword and find all related keywords we can use to write articles. Also any way we can find what keyword a page is getting traffic based on? Thanks
Technical SEO | | skandlikp90 -
Can you use Screaming Frog to find all instances of relative or absolute linking?
My client wants to pull every instance of an absolute URL on their site so that they can update them for an upcoming migration to HTTPS (the majority of the site uses relative linking). Is there a way to use the extraction tool in Screaming Frog to crawl one page at a time and extract every occurrence of _href="http://" _? I have gone back and forth between using an x-path extractor as well as a regex and have had no luck with either. Ex. X-path: //*[starts-with(@href, “http://”)][1] Ex. Regex: href=\”//
Technical SEO | | Merkle-Impaqt0 -
Penalization for Duplicate URLs with %29 or "/"
Hi there - Some of our dynamically generated product URLs somehow are showing up in SEOmoz as two different URLs even though they are the same page- one with a %28 and one with a 🙂 e.g., http://www.company.com/ProductX-(-etc/ http://www.company.com/ProductX-(-etc/ Also, some of the URLs are duplicated with a "/" at the end of them. Does Google penalize us for these duplicate URLs? Should we add canonical tags to all of them? Finally, our development team is claiming that they are not generating these pages, and that they are being generated from facebook/pinterest/etc. which doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Is that right? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | sfecommerce0 -
Is it possible to be penalized as duplicate content for one keyword but not another?
I help develop an online shopping cart and after a request from management about some products not showing up in the SERP's I was able to pinpoint it down to mostly a duplicate content issue. It's a no brainer as some times new products are inserted in with copied text from the manufacturers website. I recently though stumbled across a odd problem. When we partially re-wrote the content to seem unique enough it seemed to remedy the issue for some keywords and not others. A) If you search the company name our category listing shows as #1 ahead of the manufacturers website. We always did rank for this term. B) If you search the product name our product page is listed #3 behind two other listings which belong to the manufacturer. C) If you search the keywords together as "company product" we are still being filtered out as duplicate content. When I allow the filtered results to show we are ranking #4 It's been a full month since the changes were indexed. Before I rewrite the content even further I thought I would ask to see if any one has any insight as to what could be happening.
Technical SEO | | moondog6040 -
How to find artificial or unnatural links in OSE?
Hi, I just got a message from Google Webmaster Tools telling that there are "artificial or unnatural links" pointing to one of my subdomains, and that I should investigate and submit my site for reconsideration. The subdomain in question has inbound links from 4K linking root domains. We are a certificate authority (we provide SSL certificates) so the majority of those links come from the site seal that customers place on their secure pages. We sell certificates to a full spectrum site types, from all sizes of ecommerce sites to .edu, .gov, and even adult. That said, our linking root domains have always been a mixed bunch, which tells me that these offending links were recently added. Here are my questions: Is it possible to slice my link reports with some sort of time element, so that I can narrow the search to only the newest inbound links? How else might I use OSE to find these "artificial or unnatural links"? Are there any particular attributes I should be looking for in a linking root domain that might suggest it's seen by Google as "artificial or unnatural". Any help with any aspect of this issue would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Dennis p.s. I should probably state that I've never bought links or participated in link schemes.
Technical SEO | | dennis.globalsign0 -
Parameter handling (where to find all parameters to handle)?
Google recently said they updated their parameter handling, but I was wondering what is the best way to know all of the parameters that need "handling"? Will Google Webmaster find them? Should the company know based on what is on their site? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0