Google manual penalty?
-
Is it possible to receive a manual penalty on just 2 keywords (or any penalty for that matter) from Google but receive no message in GWT? I am going to give a lot of information here, in the hopes that it will be helpful. My apologies if it's too long.
Some of you who are here a lot, may remember my panicked questions in early January. I have learned a ton since then but I still haven't fully solved our mystery and one of the questions that remains is if perhaps one can receive a penalty for particular keywords only and not receive any messages.
Our company name, company name.com and company name + location is still coming up #1. We also still have a couple of other keywords at #4 and #7 so it seems our site wasn't penalized. My over-zealousness with the keyword usage on our Home page was pointed out to me here in the forum by Dr. Pete so I made some significant changes on that back in January and continue to tweak although I'm afraid at this point, to do too much that may cause us to lose ranking in the last two good keywords...Meanwhile, our listings on Bing and Yahoo are great and mostly continue to go up.
Back Story: We had a huge drop in the SERPS for a particular set of keywords that I feel are our most critical, at the end of December 2012 after being #3 for over a decade. We had a smaller drop in October, that worried me and I worked on the on-page and brought it back to #7 sometime in Nov or early Dec and then it disappeared to "not in top 50". I believe I overdid it.
I also got a lot of great advice and leads from Mike Tek and have been having a blast being engaged in reading, learning, following, commenting. I believe I have created some good content since January by creating a company blog and adding posts regularly- 19 so far. I have also gotten some reviews on Yelp, claimed more local listings, worked on our Google+ page, joined Communities, have been promoting our blog posts on FB, Linkedin, Twitter, Google+. We are very short in the inbound link department and I have yet to activate solutions on that score, (and sadly, the majority of our links are in client footers as we are a web design company and I don't think we should remove them without being sure they've hurt us). I am at the point of looking for some help for hire for link building as I am realizing my own limitations.
-
So sorry! One more question, please, Takeshi. My husband just reminded me that we purchased a second domain name in October and set up a redirect or forwarding to our site domain. He kept the page authority for the main URL. Our site is www.fateyes.com and the additional URL is www.fateyeswebdesign.com and that points to fateyes.com.
-
oh yeah, duh. It's not personalization. Thanks.
-
By personalization I meant sometimes our search results can be personalized, leading to different SERPs than what other people would see.
-
Wow- thanks again! Much appreciated.
We did make some changes in September and early October and I was pushing with on-page SEO on the Home page between Oct. and Dec. after the first hint of slippage, but have since pulled it back and tried to revert as much as I could remember. In late September and early October, our overseas programming company made some suggestions for page descriptions and meta keywords that I adopted, but that shouldn't matter.
The big thing they did was some link building and one article submission which I may have overstepped duplicate content with an article, now blog post, on our site to a certain extent, not understanding that issue at the time. There were 24 links listed and 268 submitted. None of the anchor text is a match for the keywords in question. Believe me, I will NEVER do that again. I don't think these guys would do anything shady, but now that I've learned more, I don't like what they did much anyway.
But with no messages from Google, it's so hard to know if it's the links. I was studying their report this morning, and there are some sites with 0 PR. I'm thinking about trying to get those removed. Do you think I should?
What do you mean by personalization? And no, the site's been up since 1998.
Thanks again!
-
It's really difficult to tell what's happened in situations like this without knowing all the details. Broadly speaking though, there are only 3 possibilities:
- Your competitors have improved their pages
- You changed something on your site that is causing you to rank lower
- Google changed their algorithm in such a way as to negatively affect you
You said that #1 probably isn't the issue here. Then you need to look at every single change you made to your site within the timeframe of the drop, and see if you can figure out what you did that might have caused it. Did you change the content? Did you edit the underlying code? Any technical site changes? Any configurations changes in GWT? Etc. If it's something you can reverse easily, try reverting some of the changes you made, and see if they had an impact.
If none of that works, and you aren't doing anything shady, then it was probably an algo change. The question then is how to get Google to see your site as relevant for those terms. Link building helps. Quality content is crucial. Since it looks like you are doing local SEO, then things like business citations, listing in business directories, Google+ profiles, all those things will help. Look at your competitors, and see what they are doing. If they are doing anything that makes their site better than yours, steal it.
That's basically all you can do. All this is assuming this isn't some reporting error or personalization, or that your site isn't brand new and being thrown into the sanbox.
-
Thank you so much, Takeshi. I really appreciate your input.
I doubt it has to do with link over-optimization. Our anchor text doesn't match the keywords in question which are 'web design' plus our location and our location 'web design'. They are very competitive words and I can see dropping several positions or to lower pages, but a sudden one time drop to out of top 50 seems to point to something severely wrong. Our competition at the top of the rankings have a lot of links and a lot more content than we do, so I understand why they are there, and it's possible that some newer companies have outranked us momentarily, but I am sure that the 50 or so ahead of us --- well, there aren't even that many web design or development companies here or nearby. Our domain authority, while it's dropped during this situation, is still higher than many. I think it may come down to a simple case of them having more links than us-some do and some don't, and I'll bet many aren't quality.
So true that there are no guarantees....and yet, I find it really compelling to try to figure out what happened. Not knowing what's broken makes it harder to fix and also harder to not repeat the same error- although, I have a lot of good ideas on what not to do in the future. I do get a little preoccupied by this question from time to time, but primarily, I've been working on creating high quality, relevant content and promoting the content in the hopes of getting links. As I mentioned, I'm on the cusp of trying to get some assistance with a link building campaign because I know it's a weak spot for me and I welcome suggestions of someone to work with.
-
Rankings for individual keywords change all the time, but in my experience drops to specific keywords have usually been the result of link over-optimization (too many links with the same, unnatural anchor text).
Other potential causes: losing links that you used to have, competitors optimizing their pages, any changes you have made to those pages which may impact relevance, changes to your internal linking, or Google updates devaluing previously values links.
There are many reasons why keywords fluctuate. Google controls the SERPs, and your position is not guaranteed even though you may have been there for years. If there are any obvious site errors, fix them, but beyond that you just have to focus on building authoritative links and creating high quality, relevant content.
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
-
Google Indexed Images: Website Vs Social Media
I use Pinterest, Twitter and Instagram to post images that are already featured on my website. I have been following a routine of uploading the images to these social media platforms only after I can see Google has indexed the image from my original site. My website is ecommerce and the product images drive sales more than any other factor. The thinking behind my method was that when these images are posted on Pinterest, Twitter and the various Instagram crawler sites (I realise Instagram images aren’t indexed directly), Google would recognise that the image was already attributed to my website. The ‘duplicate’ image would not therefore be indexed and the originally uploaded website image would remain in ‘Google Images’. After completing various searches and reviewing other Q&A’s on Moz, it seems as though this is in no way guaranteed and images reposted on social media platforms may still replace the already indexed image from the website. I am assuming this is because Google views these platforms as more authoritative than mine. I usually change the image by adding logos, text, backgrounds, borders etc before posting on Pinterest and this seems to have worked most of the time (both the original and ‘amended for Pinterest’ versions are often indexed) but images posted on other platforms are usually identical. Does it make sense to continue with my method or am I shooting myself in the foot by reposting these images on social media at all? I obviously want customers searching for products, who then click on an image, to be directed to my site rather than one of my social media pages or worse, an image reposting site. Additionally, If I post images on social media before they are uploaded to my website (for example to tease a product launch), would Google likely class these images as the ‘original’ and therefore be less likely to index the website version of the image once it is uploaded? Any thoughts are appreciated.
Social Media | | g3mmab2 -
Will Huge bounce rate from social media visits affect SEO or website Ranking according to Google algorithm factors?
We have one website and have posted our blog post url in the social media sites and got almost 5k visits in 3 days’ time, with 11sec avg time on site, zero conversions and with 97% bounce rate. This in turn reduced the total conversion rate for the same month to less than 0.5%. According to google algorithm, these are factors affecting website ranking. Can anyone guide me whether which visits from social media affect our website in any case based on these Analytics factors? Please help me out on the same! Note: Blog post topic was related to latest technology update and the landing page also based in the respective topic as well.
Social Media | | zco_seo0 -
Is there a Facebook Ad equivalent to Google MCC?
Hi Mozzers, Really unsure if we are missing something here, but whilst trying to set-up paid ads for some of our clients on FB we have run into a significant issue. We need to be able to allow FB to debit multiple business accounts for varying ads on different pages. However every time we try to access the ads manager to set-up a new ad, FB takes us to the individuals (the person logged in to the page) account, rather than creating an ad account for that page/business individually. What are we missing? We use Google MCC for managing our PPC campaigns and so wondered if there is anything similar we can use for FB? Or any other recommendations on how to get round this without dragging each client into the office and asking them to log-in so that we can set these up? Thanks!
Social Media | | Silkstream1 -
Manual submission vs automated submission to social bookmarking sites for blog posts
Howdy Mozzers! Say we're creating great content on our blog and would like this content to be seen and shared by as many people possible. Should we submit our blog posts manually to social book marking sites or use an automated service like Only Wire? The advantage of using automation is obvious, saves time on submission. Are there disadvantages? Is google bot going to raise an eyebrow and give us a dirty look? Cheers! MozAddict
Social Media | | MozAddict0 -
'Google+ gmail bias' as explained by Rand doesn't seem to work
One of the reasons we are using Google+ is the email via gmail bias. Rand says the following about this mechanism: Gmail is another way to get this same sort of bias. You can see it in there if you're logged into your Gmail account, and you can see "Hey, I'm not following this person on Google+. Oh, we've exchanged emails, so they're showing me these results higher that they've +1'd." We just started using Google+ and are determining which email address to use for this functionality to work. Of course we need to use the email address which we use for customer contact, but it's not very obvious which one that is from a Google+ bias point of view: We are using Google Apps for email hosting. We log in with our 'backoffice@company.nl' email address, which no customer of ours will ever know about. And we send emails with this backoffice account on behalf of our info@ourcompany.nl email address, which is the email address we use for all our customer contact. Both of these email addresses are 'users' of this same Google Apps account. Emails sent to info@ourcompany.nl also appear in backoffice@company.nl. So we actually never login to info@ourcompany.nl, everything is being done in backoffice@company.nl. But for the outside world (our customers) it's all about info@ourcompany.nl. Which account should we use for making our company Google+ Page? The 'backoffice' one, or info@ourcompany.nl? I have been testing to find out which account offers the bias, but neither of them showed any sign of this. I hope somebody can help me out here. Wouter Olthof
Social Media | | Smeets-Graas0 -
Google Pus Places, page and youtube issues. PLEASE HELP!!!
Ok I have a youtube channel, a page connected to that and I have a business listing but I cannot get all three to work together. Any ideas? https://plus.google.com/+CentralsaddleryCoUk is the page (I want to ad the location to this one) http://www.youtube.com/user/centralsaddleryvideo our youtube The two above seem to work fine but the local listing below will not connect to the page or youtube. https://plus.google.com/b/107598085314018001171/107598085314018001171/about?hl=en-GB This has been driving me nuts for ages.
Social Media | | mark_baird0 -
Can I use a customized Google+ icon?
I just want to ask if it is possible to use a customized Google+ icon. I am confused after I have read this "For buttons that may be rendered by the Publisher, such as the Sharing Link, the Publisher must use only the official Google-provided icon or a plain text and link combination. source: http://www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters/+1/button/policy.html Thanks in advance! 🙂
Social Media | | esiow20130 -
Explanation of Facebook referral paths in Google Analytics
In the past month I have seen a huge increase in the visits + conversions from Facebook (which is obviously great). However, from Google Analytics it appears that most of my visits are not coming from my brand page. Is there an explanation of what these referral paths mean? Top Facebook referral paths: / /l.php /home.php /ajax/emu/end.php /brand - much less visits than above URLs
Social Media | | theLotter1