Small business sites banned by google. Please help.
-
Hi.
My 2 sites http://www.painterdublin.com and http://www.tilers-dublin.com were banned by google update in November 2012.
Both were ranking fairly well in search results: painterdublin generating cca 600/month and tilers-dublin cca 300/month organic traffic from google. After update it is about 70% less.
Is there anyone willing to take a look at my pages and give me some advice about what to do to improve the situation?
thank you very much
-
The 27th of September narrows your list of possibilites down to two likely ones. The 27th was a Panda update and the 28th was EMD. Using an EMD domain name is not going to get you penalized, but it's possible that you were previously getting a lot of ranking benefit from having the keyword in your domain and now you have lost that benefit.
Panda affects sites with low quality. Often there are issues with duplicate content (i.e. content that exists on other sites on the web) or thin content.
I would guess Panda is your issue, but I'd need to dig in much further to say so for sure. For example, this article appears on your site and also on http://www.homeinsights.org/house-painting-cost/. Duplication like this can cause Panda to affect you.
-
Hello Marie. thank you very much for your help.
Now looking at my analytics for painterdublin.com exact date of the traffic drop is around 27th of september 2012. (sorry for that November)
No, I didnt receive any message in google webmaster.
I am using EMD domain names painterdublin.com and tilers-dublin.com, I wonder if that is a problem too.
Also content of my landing pages is heavily optimized for those terms (painter dublin, tilers dublin), I wonder if I crossed the "googles line" with it.
What do u think Marie?
thank u very much again
-
Hi CMC. thank you very much for your help. Now I know sites werent banned but penalized, thank u.
Now looking at my analytics for painterdublin.com exact date of the traffic drop is around 27th of september 2012. And I lost traffic from keywords like: painters dublin, painters and decorators dublin, dublin painters etc. which are my most important keywords.
There must be also some problem with my domain name, because I heard google was going after EMD's which "painterdublin.com" certainly is. What do you think?
thank you very much again
-
Hi Tom. thank u very much for your help. No, I didnt receive any message in google webmaster regarding unnatural link building. And yes, I am aware of crosslinking my sites in footers, I will remove those links, I hope it helps.
Also I am wondering if content on my landing pages is ok regarding "keyword density". Do you have an idea about this?
thank you very much again
-
The key to finding out how to improve is to first find out why your sites were affected.
Can you determine the date on which your sites were affected? There was no Penguin update in November. There was a Panda update November 5 and November 21. Panda is about on page quality. If your drop happened immediately after one of those dates then I would look for duplicate content on your site. A quick look shows me that your blog has content that also exists on other sites on the web. Getting rid of that content can help. If that is the issue then you should recover by the next Panda refresh although some sites take a few refreshes to recover.
Or, did you receive a notice in your webmaster tools of a manual warning? If so then that's a whole other issue.
There are many other possibilites. If these were new sites they could have been receiving a honeymoon boost and then been placed lower down on the SERPS. Or, you could have a malware issue or a problem with robots.txt.
But really, if you can tag the date of your drop then that's half the battle.
-
The sites have not been "banned" by Google. "Banned" suggests that they removed the sites from their index. If you search site:painterdublin.com, you'll see that's not the case.
What was the exact date of the traffic drop? Did you lose traffic from particular keywords, or from everything?
-
First, can I ask if you received any message from Google in Webmaster tools? I'm wondering whether you got an unnatural links warning.
At first glance, I think you may have received a Penguin/Over-optimisation penalty. Looking at the anchor text diversity in your link profile (http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?site=www.tilers-dublin.com) and (http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?site=www.painterdublin.com) the vast majority of your links come from anchor text heavy terms, like "painting dublin" and "tilers dublin".
Furthermore, it looks as though the majority of these links are coming from the footer from your group of websites and are site-wide. After the Penguin update, this quickly became a big red flag.
My recommendations would be first to check what message you've received from Google. After that, I would remove all of the footer links on your sites. I think you would be OK replacing these with a single link, on the homepage, to your websites - provided that you mark it as "nofollow".
Once that is done, I would file a reconsideration request. I haven't checked many of your other backlinks, so it might be the case that you would need to remove any other spammy links you can find there.
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
-
New SEO manager needs help! Currently only about 15% of our live sitemap (~4 million url e-commerce site) is actually indexed in Google. What are best practices sitemaps for big sites with a lot of changing content?
In Google Search console 4,218,017 URLs submitted 402,035 URLs indexed what is the best way to troubleshoot? What is best guidance for sitemap indexation of large sites with a lot of changing content? view?usp=sharing
Technical SEO | | Hamish_TM1 -
Ecommerce website - Transition from one subdomain to another. Please help!
Hi MOZers, I have an ecommerce website with its mobile version of the site sitting in a subdomain. It is going to be transferred to another subdomain on the same website. How do I ensure that I save/carry over most of the traffic, authority and equity to the new sudomain? At the moment, we are not looking to get rid of the subdomain but maybe later, yes. Malika
Technical SEO | | Malika10 -
Page Indexing increase when I request Google Site Link demote
Hi there, Has anyone seen a page crawling increase in Google Web Master Tools when they have requested a site link demotion? I did this around the 23rd of March, the next day I started to see page crawling rise and rise and report a very visible spike in activity and to this day is still relatively high. From memory I have asked about this in SEOMOZ Q&A a couple of years ago in and was told that page crawl activity is a good thing - ok fine, no argument. However at the nearly in the same period I have noticed that my primary keyword rank for my home page has dropped away to something in the region of 4th page on Google US and since March has stayed there. However the exact same query in Google UK (Using SEOMOZ Rank Checker for this) has remained the same position (around 11th) - it has barely moved. I decided to request an undemote on GWT for this page link and the page crawl started to drop but not to the level before March 23rd. However the rank situation for this keyword term has not changed, the content on our website has not changed but something has come adrift with our US ranks. Using Open Site Explorer not one competitor listed has a higher domain authority than our site, page authority, domain links you name it but they sit there in first page. Sorry the above is a little bit of frustration, this question is not impulsive I have sat for weeks analyzing causes and effects but cannot see why this disparity is happening between the 2 country ranks when it has never happened for this length of time before. Ironically we are still number one in the United States for a keyword phrase which I moved away from over a month ago and do not refer to this phrase at all on our index page!! Bizarre. Granted, site link demotion may have no correlation to the KW ranking impact but looking at activities carried out on the site and timing of the page crawling. This is the only sizable factor I can identify that could be the cause. Oh! and the SEOMOZ 'On-Page Optimization Tool' reports that the home page gets an 'A' for this KW term. I have however this week commented out the canonical tag for the moment in the index page header to see if this has any effect. Why? Because as this was another (if not minor) change I employed to get the site to an 'A' credit with the tool. Any ideas, help appreciated as to what could be causing the rank differences. One final note the North American ranks initially were high, circa 11-12th but then consequently dropped away to 4th page but not the UK rankings, they witnessed no impact. Sorry one final thing, the rank in the US is my statistical outlier, using Google Analytics I have an average rank position of about 3 across all countries where our company appears for this term. Include the US and it pushes the average to 8/9th. Thanks David
Technical SEO | | David-E-Carey0 -
Google ranking my site abroad, how to stop?
Hi Mozzers, I have a UK based ecommerce site, that sells only to the UK. Over the last month Google has started ranking my site on foreign flavours of Google, so I keep getting traffic coming to my site from Europe, America and the far east that we could never sell to, and as a result bounce is going up and engagement is going down. They are definitely coming to the site from google searches that relate to my product type, but in regions I do not service. Is there a way to stop google doing this? I have the target set to UK in WMT, but is there anything else I can do? I worried about my UK ranking being damaged by an increasing overall bounce rate. Thanks
Technical SEO | | FDFPres0 -
Not ranking on Google
Hi all, I am optimising a site which is a hotel directory for a small island in the Mediterranean - Malta. The site is www.maltahotelsonline.com. I did a keyword research and optimised the page. However I am now at link building stage. Since we do not have many links the site is still not ranking very well for the desired keywords (ranking fine on Bing and Yahoo yet not on Google). As a result there isn't much traffic on the site. 1. Is there any particular issue that you can spot on this site that is not allowing it to rank well on Google? 2. Any suggestions on link-building please?
Technical SEO | | ICON_Malta0 -
Does anyone know how set up and use google plus for business
Hi i am trying to work out how to use google plus to increase brand awareness and to increase traffic to my site, but i am not sure how to do this. can anyone please give me step by step instructions on setting it up and using it to generate traffic please
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
How long does it take for customized Google Site Search to show results from pdf files?
The site in question is http://www.ejmh.eu I am pretty unsatisfied with the results I am getting from the Site Search provided by Google. We have over 160 pdf files in this subfolder: http://www.ejmh.eu/mellekletek The files are the digital versions of articles. When I search for content in those pdf files, Google does not show results. It does show results from older pages, dating back 1-2 years but it is certainly not showing anything from pdf files that I have just put up 3 weeks ago. My questions: If I place a Google Search on a site, does it not automatically display results from ALL the content in the root domain? Is there any correlation between how the Site Search is indexing the files and how Google is indexing the urls in general? Should I just wait and see whether site search performance improves or should I switch to another Search software like Zoom Search? It is vital to have a proper, high-quality search functioning on that site in the very near future. What are your experiences? Any tips are greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Lauroca0