Identifying why my site has a penalty
-
Hi,
My site has been hit with a google penalty of some sort, but it doesn't coincide with a penguin or panda update. I have attached a graph of my visits that demonstrates this.
I have been working on my SEO since the latter part of last year and have been seeing good results, then all of a sudden my search referrals dropped by 70%.
Can anyone advise on what it could be?
Thanks!
Will
-
Great. Just audit it, fix problems, audit again, write more great content and give it time. Even if you fix the problem (assuming it was an onsite problem) it may take some time for Google to show the love agian.
-
Oh okay! That makes sense. Found a few issues with my php rules that automatically write links on a few of my contents pages.
I've learned some valuable tips here, such a fantastic help. I'm going to get the new site up in a week or two and we'll see if things change.
I'll keep you updated!
-
Ok so. If a bit of content resides at /bikes/mountain-bikes/ and the menulink I use is /bikes/mountain-bikes/ I'll get a status code 200. There is no added delay, no page rank lost, 200 == OK. The menu link points directly to the destination content.
Now lets say you've decided to change the location of that content to /bikes/mountain-bikes/index.html.
You do the 301 redirects on from the old url to the new one, THEN you need to update your links to reflect the new location so you're not just pointing at 301 redirects.
-
Thanks for the table of links. I'll see to it.
I'll work on the code on the new version of the site, seems pointless to do it now.
I've installed the plugin. How do I change the status code of a page? I don't really understand how it can be anything but 200, as if i'm viewing it it's obviously there! I thought 301's pushed the user to the 200 version of the page and only existed temporarily in the browser? Obviously I'm wrong, perhaps you could explain it for me?
Cheers for the screaming frog tool, looks great.
-
Did you change them. The scan I just did doesn't show them.... Maybe your host was getting funky or something lol.
Get this and click the links on your site. You want to link to status code 200, not 301
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/server-status-code-inspec/bmngiaijlojlejaiijgedgejgcdnjnpk
I wouldn't de-index them, I havent found a legitimate reason to de-index anything since 2005, but im a programmer and normally don't need to patch things. You could probably quickly fix them just by adding some content/images.
im going to private msg you another spreadsheet. this should show you source+destination of your 404's and 301's.
btw, the spider im using is Screaming Frog, its the best I've found.
-
Just checked the 418's and they do seem to be already re-directed with 301's, or are actually in place. What would be the protocol here?
-
Got your message, thank you. What tool did you completed the crawl with? I'm sort of disappointed this stuff didn't come up in my seomoz weekly scans.
A few questions;
- How do i know where the 301's are being sent from? So in a this chain of events...
Link on a page on my site > routed via a 301 > landing on the desired page
... how do I find the first step in the process? the table you sent me seems to point out only the middle step.
- Yes the 'about us' and 'contact us' pages are weak. I'm building a new version of the site as we speak and will take care of it then. In the mean time, if i no-index them is that as good as getting rid of them?
I will now sort the 404's and 418's. Without wanting to sound like a broken record; thanks again! Do let me know if there is anything I can do in return once we've got to the bottom of this.
Will
-
private messaged you a google doc of the crawl. Looks like pages that no longer exist, they need 301's.
-
Wow, thanks for all this. It's late now in the UK so I'll check it out tomorrow.
Cheers
p.s. Where are my 418's coming from!?!
-
My crawl finished. You also have a bunch of status 418 "I'm a teapot" status codes. IDK what this is so I looked it up.
Per wikipedia:
418 I'm a teapot (RFC 2324)This code was defined in 1998 as one of the traditional IETF April Fools' jokes, in RFC 2324, Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol, and is not expected to be implemented by actual HTTP servers.
-
-
You'd think so, but 1) we cant fully trust everything Google says and 2) it could have been something that the algorithm progressively finds and penalizes.
Its possible that this is not related to links or content.
Take care of your RCS and make it awesome (real company shtuff)
About us (under construction content, not good)
Contact us (weak and thin, include social
FAQ
Terms and Conditions (404 error on your site!). I once broke all my footer links on a blog that was getting 5k/day and it slammed me down to 600/day nearly instantaneously. Ive seen other sites with 404 errors survive and even Cutts has downplayed the issue of 404 errors, but I believe any 404 can be indicative of a bad user experience. Scan your site for 404s and fix them all.
Also, many of your internal links appear to be pointing to 301 redirects. Update your links to point to the status 200 status code (directly to the destination, not through 301)
In just a quick overview, the above are my notes. This isnt a detailed audit, but you should scan your site for 404 errors and fix them, get your RCS stuff in order and conduct a full site review looking for anything that may be frowned upon by google.
-
Thanks devknob,
In answer to your questions;
-
it is across all organic traffic and all keywords to my entire site
-
the content on my site is fairly squeaky clean. I've been using the seomoz pro-tool to keep it in check. I use yoast seo for wordpress to handle my canonicals and employ no dodgy js hiding techniques. I did not remove content.
-
I haven't been buying links. I do have 20,000+ sitewide links coming from bikingbis.com and 12,000 sitewide links coming from citycyclingedinburgh.info/bbpress/. The ones from bikingbis have been removed and have requested removal of the other. Anchor text is varied and is mainly branded keywords
My question is though, if it's a bad backlink problem, wouldn't it coincide with a panda or penguin update?
Thanks again
Will
-
-
Check your analytics
- Is it a specific group of keywords?
- Is it organic traffic at all?
- Is it traffic to specific page or pages?
Check your website.
- Are your link canonicals setup CORRECTLY?
- Do you have content that is hidden via css/javascript and has no mechanism for unhiding?
- Have you changed alot of links recently and not performed 301 redirects?
- Do you have good content, title tags and meta descriptions?
- Did you remove content
Check your links
- Have you been buying links? Check your backlink profile using opensite explorer. Is there any unusual activity here?
- Is your anchor text varied?
Have you gotten a notice in Google Webmasters tools?
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
-
We have a site with a lot of international traffic, can we split the site some way?
Hello, We have a series of sites and one, in particular, has around 75,000 (20%) monthly users from the USA, but we don't currently offer them anything as our site is aimed at the UK market. The site is a .com and though we own the .co.uk the .com is the primary domain. We have had a lot of success moving other sites to have the .co.uk as the primary domain for UK traffic. However, in this case, we want to keep both the UK traffic and the US traffic and if we split it into two sites, only one can win right? What could do? It would be cool to have a US version of our site but without affecting traffic too much. On the other sites, we simply did 301 redirects from the .com page to the corresponding .co.uk page. Any ideas?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AllAboutGroup0 -
Seeking Site Feedback
Hello everyone! Hope you are all doing well. Long story short, I'm currently in the 30-day trial period for Moz Pro and I'm taking advantage of running a campaign for my (currently) one-man SEO/Digital Marketing company. Recently built my site using Divi. Filled out all the SEO information through the Yoast SEO plugin, tied Google Analytics, etc... Seeking feedback on the visuals of the website and whether you have any feedback on link-building in order to bring in more traffic to the site. http://fourpeaksseo.com Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Four-Peaks-SEO0 -
Algorithmically penalized site
I have been doing SEO for years, but luckily have never had a client penalized or had to go through that. I see everyone talking about it at conferences and know the absolute basics of recovery, but just had someone come to me that was algorithmically penalized about two years ago. They have no actual data to show me a date and they couldn't tell me a specific date. According to them, their SEO disappeared and wouldn't give them access to the analytics. They are definitely showing just about every red flag with anchor tags and low trust links and tons of duplicate content. Just about everything. I realize you don't have the deep data to go by, but are there cases when it is just better to start over from scratch. They have literally thousands of bad links and strange site pages that they say they weren't even aware of. Whether they were or not I guess isn't the point now, but I have heard rumors that if you start over, Google will still figure it out and follow you with the penalty. Is this true or documented? Don't want to potentially recommend that if that is something that generally happens to bad offenders. Happy to do the work and try to resolve their issues, but it is a lot of work and is going to be expensive and want to present other options. Thanks and any thoughts suggestions are appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jeremyskillings0 -
Best URL structure for SEO for Malaysian/Singapore site on .com.au domain
Hi there I know ideally i need a .my or .sg domain, however i dont have time to do this in the interim so what would be the best way to host Malaysian content on a www.domainname.com.au website? www.domainname.com.au/en-MY
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | IsaCleanse
www.domainname.com.au/MY
domainname.com.au/malaysia
malaysia.domainname.com.au
my.domainname.com.au Im assuming this cant make the .com.au site look spammy but thought I'd ask just to be safe? Thanks in advance! 🙂0 -
Suspicious external links to site have 302 redirects
Hi, I have been asked to look at a site where I suspect some questionable SEO work, particularly link building. The site does seem to be performing very poorly in Google since January 2014, although there are no messages in WMT. Using WMT, OPenSiteExplorer, Majestic & NetPeak, I have analysed inbound links and found a group of links which although are listed in WMT, etc appear to 302 redirect to a directory in China (therefore the actual linking domain is not visible). It looks like a crude type of link farm, but I cant understand why they would use 302s not 301s. The domains are not visible due to redirects. Should I request a disavow or ignore? The linking domains are listed below: http://www.basalts.cn/
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | crescentdigital
http://www.chinamarbles.com.cn/
http://www.china-slate.com.cn/
http://www.granitecountertop.com.cn/
http://www.granite-exporter.com/
http://www.sandstones.biz/
http://www.stone-2.com/
http://www.stonebuild.cn/
http://www.stonecompany.com.cn/
http://www.stonecontact.cn/
http://www.stonecrate.com/
http://www.stonedesk.com/
http://www.stonedvd.com/
http://www.stonepark.cn/
http://www.stonetool.com.cn/
http://www.stonewebsite.com/ Thanks Steve0 -
Are duplicate item titles harmful to my ecommerce site?
Hello everyone, I have an online shopping site selling, amongst other items, candles. We have lots of different categories within the LED candles category. One route a customer can take is homepage > LED candles > Tealights. Within the tealights category we have 7 different products which vary only in colour. It is necessary to create separate products for each colour since we have fantastic images for each colour. To target different keywords, at present we have different titles (hence different link texts, different URLs and different H1 tags) for each colour, for example "Battery operated LED candles, amber", "Flameless candles, red" and "LED tealights, blue". I was wondering if different titles to target different keywords is a good idea. Or, is it just confusing to the customer and should I just stick with a generic item title which just varies by colour (eg. "LED battery candles, colour")? If I do the latter, am I at risk of getting downranked by Google since I am duplicating the product titles/link texts/URLs/H1 tags/img ALTs? (the description and photos for each colour are unique). Sorry if this is a little complicated - please ask and I can clarify anything...because I really want to give the best customer experience but still preserve my Google ranking. I have attached screenshots of the homepage and categories to clarify, feel free to go on the site live too. Thank you so much, Pravin BqFCp.jpg KC2wB.jpg BEcfX.jpg
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | goforgreen0 -
What do Bing and Yahoo look for in a site?
Do Bing and Yahoo look for authoritative sites like google does? Do they punish sites for black hat or spamming? The reason I ask these questions is because one of my competitors was ranking in first place for many great keywords in Google, they have the highest authority out of all of their competitors. They must have been punished by Google because now they are not ranking for any great keywords in Google. However they are ranking 1st in Bing and Yahoo for most the top keywords, getting the the most visibility out of all the sites. I attached a small Graph with latest visibility for the sites with the top keywords from google and then I also included the company that was punished from google they are the green circles on the graph. dIVI4.png
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEODinosaur0 -
When to give up on a website with a Google penalty?
I recently had a Google 60 penalty hit my website. The main two issues were that I had a person helping me with SEO and they bought some links. The second issue is that I own about 90 URL's in the my vertical. I created about 60 one page sites for these keyword targeted domains. I then linked these sites to main site. Big mistake! I kept these URL's all on the same server as my main site. In October 2010 I noticed my site hits dropped dramatically. I started looking for the issue. I didn't know which issue caused the penalty. I fixed both issues in November 2010 and asked Google for reconsideration in early December 2010. I kept link building for my site by finding quality links.I was extremely honest with Google. I gave them all of the domains I own and I told them the name of the person that bought links for me and the websites where those links were placed. As of late February 2011 a Google search for my domain still showed up in approximately the 64th position. I recently asked Google again to lift the penalty. I basically told them that I fixed all of my issues that led to the penalty and let them know I have been waiting for almost 3 months. I told them I have put the past 2 years of my life into this website and begged them to forgive me. I also asked them to let me know if my site was never going to be forgiven? I got the typical canned response from the Google team. As of today the penalty is still in effect. I just want to know when you should give up on a site. I have spent about $20,000 on this site and about 2 years of hard work. I don't want to give up, but I don't want to keep putting my hard work and time into the site if it will never escape the dreaded Google penalty. Do you think I should continue to wait and if so how long? Anything else I can do to persuade Google to release me from this penalty hell? If I do abandon the site and start from scratch what steps should I take? Do I need a new server? What if any content can I take from my current site and transfer to the new site? If I can how do I do this without getting another penalty or lose the credit for the original content. I created about 2,000 pages of original content for this site. I'd love to be able to transfer this content if I have to start from scratch. Any ideas or detailed help plans would be greatly appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | tadden0