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
-
Google Does not find Internal links
Hi guys I involved in difficult situation. in google webmaster tools -> internal links some important pages doesn't have any links from all pages. for example home page just have 9000 internal inks but there are 29000 indexed pages by google and some not important pages have 27000 internal links.(more than home page) Site made by angular v1 Is there anyone can help me why google could not find all internal links?
Technical SEO | | cafegardesh0 -
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 -
Can someone PLEASE help me find a solution to use a custom search engine for iPhones?? Thanks in advance!
Hey mozzers, I'm in quite the pickle today and would really appreciate some help! i need a way to have my members set their default custom search engine on their iPhones and androids to our sites search engine. Google chrome does on desktops but not iPhones. Thanks for your time/help, Tyler Abernethy
Technical SEO | | TylerAbernethy0 -
What might make Bing.bot find a URL that looks like this on our site?
I have been doing something Richard Baxter recently suggested and reviewing our server logs. I have found an oddity that hopefully some of you smart Mozzers can help me figure out. Here is the line from the server log (there are many more like this): 157.55.32.166 - - [04/Mar/2013:08:00:59 -0800] "GET /StoreFront/category/www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/shure-se-earphones HTTP/1.1" 200 94133 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)" "-" See how the www.ccisolutions.com appears after /StoreFront/category/ ? We used to see weird URLs reported in GWT that looked like this, but ever since we fixed our canonical tags to be absolute instead of relative URLs, they no longer appeared in our Webmaster Tools reports. However, it seems there is still a problem. Where/how could Bingbot be seeing URLs configured this way? Could it be a server issue, or is it most likely a data problem? Thanks in advance! Dana P.S. Could this be resulting from our massive use of relative URLs all over the site?
Technical SEO | | danatanseo0 -
Penalized by Penguin 1.1 Release
I just realized that my blog, (www.onbetterterms.com) just recently got blacklisted. That blog actually redirects to www.springcoin.com/blog On May 25th, Google released the Penguin 1.1 update. After looking at my rankings, I found out that all my keywords positions were dropped. I have no idea why, and don't know how to fix this. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | kevinyu10290 -
Crawl Diagnostics - How to find where broken links are located?
Hi, One of my sites has a 4xx error that has been picked up in the crawl diagnostics section. It is a broken link. Does anybody know if it is possible for me to find out which page the broken link was found on? I have checked all of the pages on the site that I thought were linking to the page that seems to have a problem but all of these links are fine / not broken. Any ideas? Thanks
Technical SEO | | CherryK0 -
What to do about similar content getting penalized as duplicate?
We have hundreds of pages that are getting categorized as duplicate content because they are so similar. However, they are different content. Background is that they are names and when you click on each name it has it's own URL. What should we do? We can't canonical any of the pages because they are different names. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | bonnierSEO0 -
Website has been penalized?
Hey guys, We have been link building and optimizing our website since the beginning of June 2010. Around August-September 2010, our site appeared on second page for the keywords we were targeting for around a week. They then dropped off the radar - although we could still see our website as #1 when searching for our company name, domain name, etc. So we figured we had been put into the 'google sandbox' sort of thing. That was fine, we dealt with that. Then in December 2010, we appeared on the first page for our keywords and maintained first page rankings, even moving up the top 10 for just over a month. On January 13th 2011, we disappeared from Google for all of the keywords we were targeting, we don't even come up in the top pages for company name search. Although we do come up when searching for our domain name in Google and we are being cached regularly. Before we dropped off the rankings in January, we did make some semi-major changes to our site, changing meta description, changing content around, adding a disclaimer to our pages with click tracking parameters (this is when SEOmoz prompted us that our disclaimer pages were duplicate content) so we added the disclaimer URL to our robots.txt so Google couldn't access it, we made the disclaimer an onclick link instead of href, we added nofollow to the link and also told Google to ignore these parameters in Google Webmaster Central. We have fixed the duplicate content side of things now, we have continued to link build and we have been adding content regularly. Do you think the duplicate content (for over 13,000 pages) could have triggered a loss in rankings? Or do you think it's something else? We index pages meta description and some subpages page titles and descriptions. We also fixed up HTML errors signaled in Google Webmaster Central and SEOmoz. The only other reason I think we could have been penalized, is due to having a link exchange script on our site, where people could add our link to their site and add theirs to ours, but we applied the nofollow attribute to those outbound links. Any information that will help me get our rankings back would be greatly appreciated!
Technical SEO | | bigtimeseo0