Can you be both penalised and uplifted in SERPS?

[swimwithfishes]

hello everyone,

We've literally had dozens of high ranking pages which are location specific, wiped out of the Google.co.uk SERPs.  Can't imagine that it is anything other than a manual penalty but no message has been sent by Google.

For example "campervan hire surrey" would produce our surrey page at the top of the SERP, now this page has completely disappeared.

On the other hand, we have been promoted on national keywords like "vw campervan hire" and "campervan hire" where we are second and third.

Does anyone agree that this is a penalty?

[swimwithfishes]

Nope, no message in Webmaster tools and some very slight ranking on keywords like "vw campervan hire brighton" for east sussex but apart from that nada.

[MarieHaynes]

You've got me totally stumped and it is really bugging me.

I see what you mean about the comment spam.  But the thing that gets me is that it is pointing at the home page.  So, it doesn't make sense that the home page got a boost for search terms but your inner pages are suffering.

Unfortunately I can't figure this out.  I'll be honest with you...the reason why I spend time on questions like yours is because I am trying to learn how to help sites recover.  Your question is going to bother me all day until we know what the problem is.

You're absolutely sure you don't have a message in Webmaster Tools?

Are you getting ANY search traffic at all for the location pages?

I'll let you know if I can think of anything else.

[swimwithfishes]

Yes. Thursday it was cruising along as normal and then on Friday (27th) the Sword of Damocles fell at about 12pm GMT.

I had noticed the Surrey page disappear a few days before and was confused why but other location pages were being propelled higher and higher in the SERPs, so I let it go.

Then suddenly I got a promotion on campervan hire and vw campervan hire and virtually every location keyword disappeared.

Very weird.

[MarieHaynes]

Interesting.  Are you saying your dramatic traffic drop was Friday, July 27th?  As far as I know there was no algo update on that day.  Or was it a different Friday?

[swimwithfishes]

Thanks Zachary. Why do you think it is not penalty?

[swimwithfishes]

Thanks for the detailed answer Marie, it's good to get such a thoughtful response on a question that is totally perplexing me!

I do have analytics, it's within a header.php file, so not visible in the HTML but I have GA stats for the site going  back to November 2010.  Yes the site dropped off heavily in traffic on Friday, when the algorithm/penalty hit.  Before, I received many visitors by ranking highly across several hundred location and van hire related keywords daily. eg "campervan hire cumbria", "cambridge vw campervan hire " etc etc. Literally hundreds of combinations and my location pages were at the top of the SERPs for these.

Now I am ranked highly for ( national / international ) general keywords "vw campervan hire" and "campervan hire" but not for the location combinations. Google seems to only like my homepage. Weird

In answer to your statements and questions.

1&2 - I engaged an SEO co and they did some horrible blog commenting. I know, I am bad. The site suffered in May after Penguin, I had a lot of bad comments removed and then the rankings were better than ever. I thought that was all behind me but now the site has had all it's location pages removed from rankings.

3 - I use no on site trickery! We have some really nice content and pictures, link to no bad websites and have a nice little community of people regularly engaging and contributing to the site.

4 - On all the England location pages, I made changes, so rather than the same generic tags, all my titles and meta descriptions are relevant to the area. It took ages to handwrite all these. Saying that, the page does not even rank in first ten for the page title, which is "vw campervans for hire in surrey" It used to be in position 1.

5 - The page is almost two years old.

I guess it's looking more and more like a penalty?

[MarieHaynes]

Do you have analytics data for this site?  If so, can you see a drop in traffic starting on a particular day?  (I didn't see any analytics code on your page, so you likely don't have analytics data.  I would get on this right away!)

I sleuthed out your page that I am suspecting you want to rank for the keyword you mentioned and it is definitely in the index.  (I can find it if I search for the url). But, you're right, it's not ranking.  If I put in the title of your page, I can't find it in the first 10 pages.

But, I'm puzzled as to why.  I can think of a few possibilities, but ultimately I'm not sure:

1. Penguin could cause a drop for a particular keyword.  Looking at the OSE data for this page I only see one backlink and that shouldn't be enough to give you a penalty though.  But, OSE data can be over a month old.  If you have been building links to this page and the links all contained keyword anchor text then, yes, this could trigger an algorithmic penalty.  With that being said, the last Penguin filter rolled out May 25 and I'm pretty sure OSE would contain backlinks that were present prior to that date.

2. Have some links to this page been removed?  One thing that could help this page do better is simply a link from your home page.  If you had links from other sites that have since been removed this could cause a dramatic loss in rankings.

3. Are you doing anything tricky at all with this site?  Hidden text?  Are you aware of any tricks that you've used to try to get this page to rank? I'm doubtful about this though.

4. Have you changed the wording on this page at all?  Looking at it, your keyword phrase doesn't exist in the text at all.  Putting that phrase in the text a couple of times could really help.

5. Is this a relatively new page?  If it was just created in the last few weeks, it's possible it had a honeymoon boost and got some top rankings for a while, but now it's not ranking simply because the lack of keywords and links.

Perhaps someone else has a more helpful answer.  I'm interested in knowing what the problem is as well!

[deltasystems]

It's not a penalty, but rather an algorithm change.

I'd be interested in hearing about your link building / anchors. You came out on top in the end - broad keywords are better in the long run.