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
-
I want to find all the keywords that an existing page is currently ranking for...is there a way to do that in MOZ or another tool?
I've seen this done during a software demo and saw it as the only value add for that tool but it's not worth the price of the whole tool for that one feature. The tool I saw showed you all the keywords you currently ranked for (within the top 200 positions), the position you were at, the number of users that term drove to your site and the total search volume for the keyword. SUPER useful info to have.
Technical SEO | | BrianPiper1 -
What crawler do you recommend for finding orphaned pages on a website?
Is there a crawler that you guys recommend for finding all pages, including orphaned pages on a website? A data export is not feasible. I saw a question from back in 2013 and was wondering if anything has changed since then in regards to crawling orphaned pages. Do most enterprise systems already have this built into their crawler? Or is it best to get a crawler like Xenu or Screaming Frog or Deepcrawl?
Technical SEO | | DigitalMarketingSEO0 -
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 -
Determining Penalization
Hello, I have a site that initially ranked in the first 30 google results for targeted keywords. However, after I contracted out further SEO work to a consultant, my site is nowhere to be found for any keywords. I'm afraid that they have done something to get me penalized, but I'm not sure how I would tell if 1) I have in fact been penalized and 2) what the issue(s) are so I can fix them. Thanks in advance and any help would be appreciated. -Alex
Technical SEO | | felt0 -
How do i find a trsuted joomla developer expert
hi, i need work done on my site but i am not sure how to find a trusted web developer. i know there are people out there that do this kind of work but how do you find a good one, and one that is in within budget. if anyone can let me know how i can find someone who can upgrade my joomla site to the latest version and how i can find a trusted developer then that would be good.
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
What is the best way to find missing alt tags on my site (site wide - not page by page)?
I am looking to find all the missing alt tags on my site at once. I have a FF extension that use to do it page by page, but my site is huge and that will take forever. Thanks!!
Technical SEO | | franchisesolutions1 -
Find where the not selected pages are from
Hi all Can anyone suggest how I can find where gtoogle is finding approx. 1000 pages not to select? In round numbers I have 110 pages on the site site: searech shows all pages index status shows 110 slected and 1000 not selected. For the life of me I cannot fingure where these pages are coming from. I have set my prefered domain to www., setup 301 's to www. as per below RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^growingyourownveg.com$
Technical SEO | | spes123
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ "http://www.growingyourownveg.com/$1" [R=301,L] site is www.growingyourownveg.com any suggestions much appreciated Simon0 -
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