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
-
Penalized By Google
My site name is bestmedtour .it's in English. I also want to have the Arabic version of the site. If I translate it with Google Translate, is it possible that the Arabic version of the site will be penalized?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aalinlandacc0 -
Google Docs
Hi Mozers, I was wondering what do you guys think about indexing Google Docs files as Documents or Spreadsheets? Can you do that and is it any help if you what to get some content on the firs page of Google. And also can Google see that content and links, because when I deactivate the javascript on chrome I couldn't see anything from the content Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VeeamSoftware0 -
Can we talk a bit more about cannibalisation? Will Google pick one page and disregard others.
Hi all. I work for an e-commerce site called TOAD Diaries and we've been building some landing pages recently. Our most generic page was for '2017 Diaries'. Take a look here. Initial results are encouraging as this page is ranking top page for a lot of 'long tail' search queries, e.g) '2017 diaries a4', '2017 diaries a5', '2017 diaries week to view' etc. Interesting it doesn't even rank top 50 for the 'head term'... '2017 diaries'. **And our home page outranks it for this search term. **Yet it seems clear that this page is considered relevant and quality by Google it ranks just fine for the long tails. Question: Does this mean Google 'chosen' our home page over the 2017-page landing page? And that's why the 2017-page effectively doesn't rank for it's 'head term'? (I can't see this as many times a website will rank multiple times such as amazon) But any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Also, what would you do in this scenario? Work on home-page to try to push it up for that term and not worry about the landing page? Any suggestions or thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Hope that makes sense. Do shout if not. Thanks in advance. Isaac.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | isaac6630 -
"Null" appearing as top keyword in "Content Keywords" under Google index in Google Search Console
Hi, "Null" is appearing as top keyword in Google search console > Google Index > Content Keywords for our site http://goo.gl/cKaQ4K . We do not use "null" as keyword on site. We are not able to find why Google is treating "null" as a keyword for our site. Is anyone facing such issue. Thanks & Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
Google Manual Action Disappear
Hi Guys, I have a website that received unnatural link message. We had started link removal process, disavowed not approachable links and file reconsideration four times but all the times Google sent some samples of unnatural links and rejected our reconsideration. Last week we again disavowed non approachable links and planned to file reconsideration after a week but today when i tried to file reconsideration, Manual action message was disappeared. We haven't received any message from Google. The same case was happened with one more of our site earlier. Manual action disappeared means it has been revoked or something else??
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RuchiPardal0 -
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 places
Is there away to get to the top of google places? Can it be manipulated?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dynamic080 -
Sitelink demotion from Google Webmaster
HI Everybody, When I search Vallnord on Google one of the sitelinks takes you to a site that does not exists. In order to avoid this sitelink to appear I Demoted that URL using Google Webmaster. Any idea how much time will this take in order to see the results? Regards, G.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SilbertAd0