Penalty recovery gone
-
Back in August we got a manual penalty lifted by Google for spammy links that we never created. This had been affecting us for almost a year. For about six weeks our traffic bounced back up to pre-penalty levels - between 60 and 120% greater a day from Google search traffic.
Since then, our Google organic traffic has decayed to the point where yesterday we were back below our penalty level and we don't have a new penalty.
Can anyone give me some advice about what may have caused this? Link to our site.
-
Thank you for the suggestions. It looks like we may have taken a hit from Panda 21 at the beginning of November but we were moving the site to a new server so the days right before the update don't have any analytics data.
The last couple of days saw a spike last year because Advent started this weekend instead of next weekend this year so that's why some of the numbers for this weekend look off.
Overall though, it looks like we hit a peak for most keywords in January and then saw a major decline in February when we received our manual penalty and even though the penalty has been officially revoked, we've never recovered fully.
Thanks for the panguin suggestion. We use chartelligence which actually overlays within GA on any chart which is very nice.
I guess I'll go back and manually disavow those bad links even though I've already submitted them and see what happens.
-
It is strange that a page has bad links if not done SEO, I think you may be being affected by Negative Seo
-
A great tool for checking your traffic against google updates is panguin tool - it's a great resource for seeing your google traffic and any drops you may have had and how they're related to panda, penguin, and other algo updates.
Also, check in webmaster tools your latest links - see if more spammy links are coming in recently and if this correlates in any way with your drop - if so, disavow these links and do another reconsideration request.
Do you know if it was specific keywords that were bringing a lot of traffic that you've dropped for or it's more across the board? That will help in figuring out the problem.
Mark
-
You can disavow links in GWT.
-
Hi Ian,
You might still be having bad links associated with your site, that's why you've gone down in traffic again. Check to see if the drop in traffic was associated with any of Google's updates here . Check your competitors and the keywords that they are outranking you for. Are they better optimized for those keywords?
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
-
301 redirect to avoid duplicate content penalty
I have two websites with identical content. Haya and ethnic Both websites have similar products. I would like to get rid of ethniccode I have already started to de-index ethniccode. My question is, Will I get any SEO benefit or Will it be harmful if I 301 direct the below only URL’s https://www.ethniccode/salwar-kameez -> https://www.hayacreations/collections/salwar-kameez https://www.ethniccode/salwar-kameez/anarkali-suits - > https://www.hayacreations/collections/anarkali-suits
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | riyaaaz0 -
How to avoid Google penalties being inherited when moving on with a new domain?
Looking for SEOs who have experience with resetting projects by migrating on to a new domain to shed either a manual or algorithmic penalty. My questions are: For algorithmic penalties, what is the best migration strategy to avoid inheriting any kind of baggage? 301, 302, establish no connection between the two sites? For manual penalties, what is the best migration strategy to avoid inheriting any kind of baggage? 301, 302, establish no connection between the two sites? Any other input on these kind of reset projects is appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | spanish_socapro0 -
Rotating content = Google Penalty?
Hi all. We have an ecommerce site which features various product sections. In each section you might have 60 products each displayed neatly in pages of 10. We recently added functionality, so that if a product is out of stock, it will automatically drop that product to the back of the list and bring another in stock one forward. We're just worried that Google will view the same information, repeatedly rotating on the first page of 10 products (the page that ranks) and think we're in some way trying to trick Google into thinking the content is fresh? Does anyone have a throw on this? Is it likely to penalise us? Thank you!!! Ben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bnknowles10 -
Trying to advise on what seems to be a duplicate content penalty
So a friend of a friend was referred to me a few weeks ago as his Google traffic fell off a cliff. I told him I'd take a look at it and see what I could find and here's the situation I encountered. I'm a bit stumped at this point, so I figured I'd toss this out to the Moz crowd and see if anyone sees something I'm missing. The site in question is www.finishlinewheels.com In Mid June looking at the site's webmaster tools impressions went from around 20,000 per day down to 1,000. Interestingly, some of their major historic keywords like "stock rims" had basically disappeared while some secondary keywords hadn't budged. The owner submitted a reconsideration request and was told he hadn't received a manual penalty. I figured it was the result of either an automated filter/penalty from bad links, the result of a horribly slow server or possibly a duplicate content issue. I ran the backlinks on OSE, Majestic and pulled the links from Webmaster Tools. While there aren't a lot of spectacular links there also doesn't seem to be anything that stands out as terribly dangerous. Lots of links from automotive forums and the like - low authority and such, but in the grand scheme of things their links seem relevant and reasonable. I checked the site's speed in analytics and WMT as well as some external tools and everything checked out as plenty fast enough. So that wasn't the issue either. I tossed the home page into copyscape and I found the site brandwheelsandtires.com - which had completely ripped the site - it was thousands of the same pages with every element copied, including the phone number and contact info. Furthering my suspicions was after looking at the Internet Archive the first appearance was mid-May, shortly before his site took the nose dive (still visible at http://web.archive.org/web/20130517041513/http://brandwheelsandtires.com) THIS, i figured was the problem. Particularly when I started doing exact match searches for text on the finishlinewheels.com home page like "welcome to finish line wheels" and it was nowhere to be found. I figured the site had to be sandboxed. I contacted the owner and asked if this was his and he said it wasn't. So I gave him the contact info and he contacted the site owner and told them it had to come down and the owner apparently complied because it was gone the next day. He also filed a DMCA complaint with Google and they responded after the site was gone and said they didn't see the site in question (seriously, the guys at Google don't know how to look at their own cache?). I then had the site owner send them a list of cached URLs for this site and since then Google has said nothing. I figure at this point it's just a matter of Google running it's course. I suggested he revise the home page content and build some new quality links but I'm still a little stumped as to how/why this happened. If it was seen as duplicate content, how did this site with no links and zero authority manage to knock out a site that ranked well for hundreds of terms that had been around for 7 years? I get that it doesn't have a ton of authority but this other site had none. I'm doing this pro bono at this point but I feel bad for this guy as he's losing a lot of money at the moment so any other eyeballs that see something that I don't would be very welcome. Thanks Mozzers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NetvantageMarketing2 -
Google Manual Action (manual-Penalty)- Unnatural inbound links
Dear friends, I just get from Google two "Unnatural inbound links" notifications via Google Webmaster Tools, the first is for our WWW version of the site and the second is for the NON-WWW version. My question, I should send two identical reconsideration request for WWW and NON-WWW or treat them as different sites? Thank you Claudio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SharewarePros0 -
Recovering from an Automatic penalty
My website dropped from ~15 to 500 + for our main keywords in target markets (but are still doing okay in other countries and for other keywords) I cleaned my site up and contacted Google who told me no manual spam actions were taken on my site. The only thing I can think is that we suffered from an automatic penalty (the drop corresponded with a small panda update). If that is in fact what happened, how do we recover? Also feel free to contribute other ideas about what may have occurred.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
403, 301, 302, 404 errors & possible google penalty
William Rock ran a Xenu site scan on nlpca(dot)com and mentioned the following: ...ran a test with Xenu site scan and it found a lot of broken links with 403, 301, 302, 404 Errors. Other items found: Broken page-local links (also named 'anchors', 'fragmentidentifiers'): http://www.nlpca.com/DCweb/Interesting_NLP_Sites.html#null anchor occurs multiple timeshttp://www.nlpca.com/DCweb/Interesting_NLP_Sites.html#US not found Could somone give us an output of that list, and which ones of these errors do we need to clean up for SEO purposes? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Internal Anchor Text Penalty Clarification
I believe we may be seeing the initial stages of a penalty for over-using internal anchor text on our ecommerce site. Per Rand and other training, we added related product links and popular category links to our product and category pages. At the time, we did not have an html sitemap in the footer. We're a small to medium sized site with 1,700+ products. We have since added an html sitemap of our categories to our footer. Now we have category links in the sitemap and category pages and product pages with targeted anchor text. I'm beginning to see downward movement on some of those targeted categories. If I have an html sitemap in the footer (category index) should I get rid of the popular category links throughout the rest of the site? Also, with more frequency, I'm seeing a "product index" and "category index" in footers. Is this a best practice? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AWCthreads0