Google Sitemaps & punishment for bad URLS?
-
Hoping y'all have some input here. This is along story, but I'll boil it down:
Site X bought the url of Site Y. 301 redirects were added to direct traffic (and help transfer linkjuice) from urls in Site X to relevant urls in Site Y, but 2 days before a "change of address" notice was submitted in Google Webmaster Tools, an auto-generating sitemap somehow applied urls from Site Y to the sitemap of Site X, so essentially the sitemap contained urls that were not the url of Site X.
Is there any documentation out there that Google would punish Site X for having essentially unrelated urls in its sitemap by downgrading organic search rankings because it may view that mistake as black hat (or otherwise evil) tactics? I suspect this because the site continues to rank well organically in Yahoo & Bing, yet is nonexistent on Google suddenly.
Thoughts?
-
If it was only 2 days, quickly fix the sitemap and re submit it. I do not think Google will punish your sites rankings that quickly.
I would also perform a indepth search of links to the new site and see if maybe the site had some bad links and were going to get hit with a penalty for that.
You can also view this post for the 301 redirect
http://www.seomoz.org/q/can-penalties-be-passed-via-301-redirects
-
How long has the site been non-existent? By non-existent do you mean none of the pages are in Google's index or that they are simply not ranking as high as they used to? If site X has been de-indexed, try resubmitting a corrected sitemap. It might take a little bit for Google to crawl and re-index, but I'd think then it would be fine. If you truly have been removed from Google's index, fix the sitemap and file a reconsideration request. I would think Google would recognize this as an honest mistake.
Good luck. I hope that helps a little.
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
-
Backlinks from customers' websites. Good or bad? Violation?
Hi all, Let's say a company holds 100 customers and somehow getting a backlink from all of their websites. Usually we see "powered by xyz", etc. Is something wrong with this? Is this right backlinks strategy? Or violation of Google guidelines? Generally most of the customers's websites do not have good DA; will it beneficial getting a backlinks from such average below DA websites? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Are links on sites that require PAD files good or bad for SEO?
I want to list our product on a number of sites that require PAD files such as Software Informer and Softpedia. Is this a good idea from an SEO perspective to have links on these pages?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SnapComms0 -
Black hat : raising CTR to have better rank in Google
We all know that Google uses click-through-rate (CTR) as one of it is ranking factor. I came up with an idea in my mind. I would like to see if someone saw this idea before or tried it. If you search in Google for the term "SEO" for example. You will see the moz.com website in rank 3. And if you checked the source code you will see that result 3 is linking to this url: https://www.google.com.sa/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CDMQFjAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Fmoz.com%2Fbeginners-guide-to-seo&ei=F-pPVaDZBoSp7Abo_IDYAg&usg=AFQjCNEwiTCgNNNWInUJNibqiJCnlqcYtw That url will redirect you to seomoz.com Ok, what if we use linkbucks.com or any other cheap targeted traffic network and have a campaign that sends traffic to the url that I show you. Will that count as traffic from Google so it will increase the CTR from Google?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Mohtaref11 -
Ajax Pagination on Ecommerce category pages - Good or Bad?
We have an ecommerce site. We installed an AJAX feature that when you scroll down to say, the end of 6 rows of products, it loads another page below the seam. Question is, is this good or bad for SEO? Any tests you can suggest? Thanks Ben
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bjs20100 -
Google admits it can take up to a year to refresh/recover your site after it is revoked from Penguin!
I found myself in an impossible situation where I was getting information from various people that seem to be "know it all's" but everything in my heart was telling me they were wrong when it came to the issues my site was having. I have been on a few Google Webmaster Hangouts and found many answers to questions I thought had caused my Penguin Penalty. After taking much of the advice, I submitted my Reconsideration Request for the 9th time (might have been more) and finally got the "revoke" I was waiting for on the 28th of MAY. What was frustrating was on May 22nd there was a Penguin refresh. This as far as I knew was what was needed to get your site back up in the organic SERPS. My Disavow had been submitted in February and only had a handful of links missing between this time and the time we received the revoke. We patiently waited for the next penguin refresh with the surety that we were heading in the right direction by John Mueller from Google (btw.. John is a great guy and really tries to help where he can). The next update came on October 4th and our rankings actually got worse! I spoke with John and he was a little surprised but did not go into any detail. At this point you have to start to wonder WHAT exactly is wrong with the website. Is this where I should rank? Is there a much deeper Panda issue. We were on the verge of removing almost all content from the site or even changing domains despite the fact that it was our brand name. I then created a tool that checked the dates of every last cached date of each link we had in our disavow file. The thought process was that Google had not re-crawled all the links and so they were not factored into the last refresh. This proved to be incorrect,all the links had been re-cached August and September. Nothing earlier than that,which would indicate a problem that they had not been cached in time. i spoke to many so called experts who all said the issue was that we had very few good links left,content issues etc.. Blah Blah Blah, heard it all before and been in this game since the late 90's, the site could not rank this badly unless there was an actual penalty as spam site ranked above us for most of our keywords. So just as we were about to demolish the site I asked John Mueller one more time if he could take a look at the site, this time he actually took the time to investigate,which was very kind of him. he came back to me in a Google Hangout in late December, what he said to me was both disturbing and a relief at the same time. the site STILL had a penguin penalty despite the disavow file being submitted in February over 10 months ago! And the revoke in May. I wrote this to give everyone here that has an authoritative site or just an old one, hope that not all is lots just yet if you are still waiting to recover in Google. My site is 10 years old and is one of the leaders in its industry. Sites that are only a few years old and have had unnatural link building penalties have recovered much faster in this industry which I find ridiculous as most of the time the older authoritative sites are the big trustworthy brands. This explains why Google SERPS have been so poor for the last year. The big sites take much longer to recover from penalties letting the smaller lest trustworthy sites prevail. I hope to see my site recover in the next Penguin refresh with the comfort of knowing that my site currently is still being held back by the Google Penguin Penalty refresh situation. Please feel free to comment below on anything you think is relevant.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | gazzerman10 -
Should you include keywords in your domain name to rank well on Google Places?
Is it okay to include keywords in your domain name (as well as business name) to rank well on Google Places? In my opinion, this is very spammy and the sites using this technique will be slapped by Google sooner or later.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | thegoatman1 -
Do some sites get preference over others by Google just because? Grandfathered theory
So I have a theory that Google "grandfathers" in a handful of old websites from every niche and that no matter what the site does, it will always get the authority to rank high for the relevant keywords in the niche. I have a website in the crafts/cards/printables niche. One of my competitors is http://printable-cards.gotfreecards.com/ This site ranks for everything... http://www.semrush.com/info/gotfreecards.com+(by+organic) Yet, when I go to visit their site, I notice duplicate content all over the place (extremely thin content, if anything at all for some pages that rank for highly searched keywords), I see paginated pages that should be getting noindexed, bad URL structure and I see an overall unfriendly user experience. Also, the backlink profile isn't very impressive, as most of the good links are coming from their other site, www.got-free-ecards.com. Can someone tell me why this site is ranking for what it is other than the fact that it's around 5 years old and potentially has some type of preference from Google?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Hi, I found that one of my competitors have zero backlings in google, zero in yahoo but about 50.000 in Bing. How is that possible?
Hi, I found that one of my competitors have zero backlings in google, zero in yahoo but about 50.000 in Bing. How is that possible? I assumed that all search engines would finde the backlinks. Besides that he ranks fair well and better than I do with only a single site and with only one article of content while I have a lot of content and sites. I do not undersdtand why he is ranking better in google, while google assumingly does not see any backlinks of the 50.000 bing is finding. Thx, Dan
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | docschmitti0