Google Penalty, Which one is hitting me?
-
Hello there SEOMOZ'ers,
Just signed up for a Pro Account. Impressed with the trial. Just wondering is there any way to find out if you have fallen foul of a Google update, is there any way to know which you have fallen foul of or is the date it happens the only guide or pointer to what might have happened?
My site was getting a reasonable amount of traffic for the last few years and was ranking well for my main search terms up till Feburary the 4th when the traffic fell by almost 50% ... and it has never really recovered.
I thought it might be the Above the Fold Advertising penalty (or whatever it is called) because I had a lot of images linking elsewhere on my site, above the fold on my homepage, but I removed them about 4 weeks ago and the traffic still hasnt recovered.
I've been using SEOMOZ to detect duplicate content and various other problems with my site since and fixing a good few of them each week. I have the main issues down from about 300 to about 20 which i think i have just fixed.
I have also used Copyscape and found that some other websites had stolen some of my content, which i have since rewritten.
I was ranking number 2 or 3 for my main keyword but dropped out of the top 100 in February, which is pretty frustrating at this stage. I don;t know if I have accidentally gone too far over optimising my site or what has happened.
If anyone can give me some pointers I'd really appreciate it, if anyone can help me fix it I'll buy them a beer next time you are in Ireland!
Thanks,
Shane
-
Sounds a risky strategy Toyz! Good luck with it!
-
Hi All,
I hope this works what I have done is. I looked at my webmastertools account and identified those pages that have obviously too may links about 5 pages have some 1500 links pointing to them. I have made hard 404s. I changed the page urls. I asked google to remove them from the index and I disallowed them in my robots.txt. I am hoping that this will then mean that those incoming links are no longer an issue. I resubmitted my site for inclusion and am waiting on an answer.Apparently this process takes some time
What this means of course is that those pages now have no incoming links so I have to start my seo for them all over again. Very carefully this time.
Of course I am in trouble if there are too many spammy links pointing to my homepage. So I am writing to webmasters of not so good neighbourhood sites and asking them to remove links to my site from theirs.
My google organic traffic is about 1/6 what it was so I have carefully increased adwords spend and am doing heaps more email marketting to keep sales up. BTW have also fired my SEO firm
-
If I was to resubmit my site for review am i any more likely to get feedback from Google as to the problem?
-
Thanks Blocker - it must be a penalty alright because it is such a sharp and sudden decrease in traffic.
Where do I go from here?
-
To make the whole google thing even more confusing, many sites are getting hit with no message. So, if you don't have the message, you may well still have been penalised.
Absolute carnage and the serps have gone back to the stone age. Google has well and truly lost it.
-
So if you have a Google Penalty you should get a message in web-master tools? I don't have a message in there, in fact the only real problem I can see in web-master tools now is a lot of my pages have the same meta description which I'll work on now but that is unlikely to be the full issue, is it?
-
and what ve you done I ve the same problem: penalty for innatural link.
I don't know what can I do bacause of I ve not do much more of this link.
I ve no paied link no take part to farm and so on.
Sorry for my english but I m an Italian girl please Help me.
-
Hi Shane,
Same thing just happened to me. I have ranked well for many of my keywords for years. On April 13 my site received a google penalty for to many unnatural links. The message appeared in my webmastertools account.
Regards Colin
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 ignoring Canonical and choosing its own
Hey Mozzers, We have several products that all have upto 6 different versions, they are the same product but in a different specification. As users search via these specifications (within our website) it is beneficial to keep all 6 products as different listings on the website. In google however it is not. So we kept all 6 listing but chose 1 to be the google landing page, the only different between them all is the technical specification + occasionally size. But 95% of the pages are the same. Let call the products A, B, C, D, E, F, we made all the canonicals point to C because this is out best selling version of the product. However, google has chosen E to rank instead. What is my best move here? Should i accept the page google has chosen and change the canonicals the point to that version or should I be stubborn and try to get google to change which version it ranks. As always many thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ATP0 -
Penalty from Google due to spam that was not our doing
Hi, My company has enjoyed pretty good rankings for our main keywords in Google for the past 13+ years we have been in business. We have always been very white-hat about our SEO -- always erring on the side of not doing anything rather than risking a penalty. Well, last Thursday, we received the dreaded Google penalty due to a pattern of unnatural links. The hit is devastating - we are not even in the top 50 for our own company name anymore. Through research, we believe we have found the culprit -- and it has nothing to do with any of our own actions. We operate a discussion forum, and there was a link to one of the threads that was being used as the target for a lot of link spam -- Chinese blog comments, etc. We had nothing to do with this, but obviously someone had an agenda and was working on spamming to this page. Who knows - it may have even been the company that was being discussed negatively in the thread, attempting to have us blocked. We discovered it the same day we received the penalty notice, and issued a reconsideration request, detailing what we believe we found. So far, we haven't disavowed any of the links, but I am thinking we should. We have asked Google if they're able to just turn off any link juice for that one page, especially since we don't know who is doing this spamming, and whether they will continue. Has anyone experienced something similar? How does one prevent themselves from receiving a penalty that they had nothing to do with? What is there to keep any competitor from launching a spammy link-building campaign to get their competitor removed from Google? Is there anything we can do to resolve this? Thanks for any and all thoughts...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kylie_rw0 -
Google stripping down Page Titles
When viewing pages indexed by Google, I've noticed the Page Titles have be down stripped as follows: Actual Page Title: CITY Keyword - STATE keyword
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SpadaMan
Google Indexed Page Title: 1 - Domain.com None of the keywords in the actual PAGE TITLE are present; all words have been replaced with a random digit -domain.com. We launched a new version of the site several months back.. Any Idea on what can be causing this?0 -
Google Authorship. Is there a way to check all the articles by one author?
Hey guys, Is there any search query or website where I can get a list with all the articles by one author? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Felip30 -
Google Local oddity
So I spotted something a little weird... one of my client's Google Local placements in blended results has the domain name - complete with the .com extension appearing where the business name typically appears: Businessxyz.com www. businessxyz .com of Google reviews Has anyone seen this? I setup their Google Places account quite some time ago and used the business name - not the url. I also setup their Google+ and Local page - using the name. None of the page titles on the website contain the url. I simply can not pinpoint where G is pulling this from or why for that matter. All competitors are appearing with business name - only my client has the domain name visible for the particular local search query. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SCW0 -
Were small sites hit by Panda?
It seems that primarily large sites were hit by Panda, but does any one know of / own a small site that was hit by Panda?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
How long does a Google penalty last if you have fixed the problem??
Hi I stupidly thought that it would be a good idea to set up a reciprocal links page on my website named 'links'. I did this because my competitors were linking to these pages so I though it would be a good idea and I genuinely didn't know that you could be punished for this. Within about 3 weeks my rank dropped about 3 pages. I have since removed the links and the page was cached last Friday but the site still appears to have a penalty. I assumed when Google cached the page and saw the links were not there anymore that the penalty would be lifted. Anyone got any ideas? ps. The competitor websites had broken their links pages into various categories relating to the website i.e. related directories etc. so this might be why they weren't penalized.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BelfastSEO0 -
Have we suffered a Google penalty?
Hello, In January, we started a new blog to supplement our core ecommerce website. The URL of the website is www.footballshirtblog.co.uk and the idea behind it was that we would write articles related to our industry to build a community which would ultimately boost our sales. We would add several posts per day, a mix between shorter news stories of around 150 words and more detailed content pages of around 500 words. Everything was going well, we were making slow but sure progress on the main generic keywords but were receiving several thousand visitors a day, mostly finding the posts themselves on Google. The surge on traffic meant we needed to move server, which we did around 6 weeks ago. When we did this, we had a few teething problems with file permissions, etc, which meant we were tempoarily able to add new posts. As our developers were tied up with other issues, this continued for a 7-10 day period, with no new content being added. In this period, the site completely dropped from Google, losing all it's rankings and traffic, to the extent it now doesn't even rank for it's own name. This is very frustrating as we have put a huge amount of work and content into developing this site. We have added a few posts since, but not a huge amount as it is frustrating to do it with no return and the concern that the site has been banned forever. I cannot think of any logical reason why this penalty has occured as we haven't been link spamming, etc. Does anyone have any feedback or suggestions as to how we can get back on track? Regards,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ukss1984
David0