I have a penalized site and don't know what the cause is
-
I have a site which appears to have a Google indexation penalty. According to Google because its violating the T/Cs.
Here are some background details about the site:
The site is a online poker + deposit methods related site on a .co.uk TLD. It has 30+ uniquely written pages, and no advertising at the moment.
In June of 2010, June 10 to be precisely, I bought this site from a fellow webmaster/affiliate. After the site 's ownership changed I tried accessing the server, but I couldn't log into it . I noticed that this host had serious problems and the IP was unreachable. After trying for some time the previous owner got me all the content in Word files and I created a new hosting account and re-launched the site on June 28.
Between a couple of days after June 10 and June 28, the site was unreachable, and completely de-indexed from Google.
When I re-launched the site, I used the default Wordpress Template Twenty Ten, and created new pages with the Word files I received from the previous owner.
I waited a bit, but noticed the site didn't get re-indexed. So on August 18th I moved the content of domain xxx.com to yyy.co.uk/xxx/ and 301-ed all the former locations, hoping that this might help yyy.co.uk get indexed..... but nothing.
On October 28 of 2010 I submitted my first reconsideration request, which was processed on November 17th without any change. At that time Google didn't say if anything was wrong like now, so I just waited... and waited... and waited some more.
At some point I was ready to let this one go, as I didn't/don't see any problems with it. In fact, it used to be indexed before.
By now, I removed all links pointing to it that I had control off, and there are hardly any left over. The site as well doesn't have any outgoing links left, so that can't be it either. I also removed a kind-a duplicate keyword heavy menu from the sidebar, as well as the widgets from the footer. Finally I also fixed a problem caused by Yoast Wordpress SEO Plugin, but I only installed this plugin recently, so that could not be the problem that caused the penalty.
So after another reconsideration request Google again let me know this site still has issues, but I really have no clue which, or how to find out. I don't feel like doing any work on this site, as there is no guarantee that it will ever lose its penalty.
What should I do now?
-
Was a bit sarcastic with my answer but yeah the site is added to WMT and nothing funky to discover that explains the penalty.
-
Nope, but WMT has a diagnostic section that would tell you if Google thought you had anything bad on your site or maybe give you a little clue as to why you were excluded.
I assume your reluctance stems from some other Google Account infraction that you've not mentioned?
-
Uhm, do you know of a way of requesting for a re inclusion outside of Webmaster Tools?
-
Firstly let me congratulate you on choosing such an excellent poker room to promote Our promos are a bit out of date though you'll want to get the Summer Gifts up as players generally like it and can usually get something from it
Task in hand though... Hard to tell, you're obviously not indexed, but couldn't tell you why just by looking.
Add webmaster tools to your site as it will often tell you why you have received a penalty.
It could be you'll just have to keep submitting reinclusion requests until you get someone sympathetic. You don't seem to be doing anything wrong (no adsense on the site, nothing dodgy in the code... that I can see). If you had malware on your old host it could be getting held against you, but unless Google tells you what's wrong...
Maybe they just don't like you using Piwik's analytics over theirs!
-
Thanks for your reply.
When I bought the site, before the down period, it didn't have any issues and all content was still indexed.
Unfortunately, Google didn't say anything about it. I get the awkward feeling the reviewer in question might have a personal problem with the specific niche being online poker.
The site's URL is depositpoker.co.uk - I used the default Wordpress template to avoid any possible issues, but that doesn't mean I don't have the intention to use a nicer one, once the site gets indexed
On every re inclusion attempt I explained exactly what I did and tried to address everything that could have been wrong. Now, it's just content, but I am left clueless why they don't allow it back in the SERPs.
I have one site pages, just being there to age domains, which have no problem getting indexed. So I don't see why this one is.
-
The summary is you bought a site which had problems with Google. You addressed some of the issues, but clearly there are issues which remain.
Did Google offer any other details other then the site violates their T&Cs?
Do you have any idea what the problem could be?
What is the site URL? We need to be able to see the site to determine if there are any apparent issues.
The bottom line, you need to correct any issues, then submit another reconsideration request. You will need to explain to Google that you purchased the site and have been trying to clean it up.
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
-
Falling rankings - can't figure out why
I am still fairly green on in depth SEO, however I have a good grasp on making a site SEO friendly, as my skills are more down to website construction than technical SEO, however, I am working on a site at the moment which just continues to lose rankings and is slipping further and further. Keywords are dropping week on week in rankings Search visibility is also dropping week on week On site sales have fallen massively in the last quarter We have made huge improvements on the following; Moved the site to a faster stand alone cloud vps server - taken page rank scores from 54 to 87%. Added caching (WP Rocket) & CDN support. Improved URL structure (Woocommerce) removed /product and or /product-category from URLS to give more accurate & relevant structures. Added canonical URLs to all product categories (We use Yoast Premium) Amended on page structures to include correct H tags. Improved Facebook activity with a huge increase in engagements These are just some of the improvements we have made, yet we're still seeing huge drops in traffic and rankings. One insight I have noted which may be a big pointer, is we have 56 backlinks.... which I know is not good and we are about to address this. I suspect this is the reason for the poor performance, but should I be looking at anything else? Is there anything else we should be looking at? As I said, I'm no SEO specialist, but I don't think there's been any Penguin penalty, but my expertise is not sufficient enough to dig deeper. Can anyone offer any constructive advice at this stage? I'm thinking things to look at that could be hurting us that isn't immediately obvious? The site is www.glassesonspec.co.uk Thanks in advance Bob
Technical SEO | | SushiUK0 -
Why isn't my homepage number #1 when searching my brand name?
Hi! So we recently (a month ago) lunched a new website, we have great content that updates everyday, we're active on social platforms, and we did all that's possible, at the moment, when it comes to on site optimization (a web developer will join our team this month and help us fix all the rest). When I search for our brand name all our social profiles come up first, after them we have a few inner pages from our different news sections, but our homepage is somewhere in the 2nd search page... What may be the reason for that? Is it just a matter of time or is there a problem with our homepage I'm unable to find? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Orly-PP0 -
What to do with 404 errors when you don't have a similar new page to 301 to ??
Hi If you have 404 errors for pages that you dont have similar content pages to 301 them to, should you just leave them (the 404's are optimised/qood quality with related links & branding etc) and they will eventually be de-indexed since no longer exist or should you 'remove url' in GWT ? Cheers Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Don't reach to make our site back in rankings
My URL is: http://tinyurl.com/nslu78 Hi, I really hope someone can help because my site seems to be penalized since last year now. Because we were not SEO experts but doctors and wanted to do things in a white hat way so we have given our SEO strategy (on-site and off-site) to the best US SEO agencies and now we are penalized. We was ranking on the 1st page with 15 keywords and now we don't even are in the first 10 pages. I know that our sector is suspicious but we are a real laboratory and our site is 100% transparent. I understand that a lot of people can think that we are all the same but this is not true, we are not a virtual company that don't even show their name or address, we show name, address, phone number, fax, email, chat service, VAT number everything so please help us. We have spent 3 months analysing every paragraph of google guidelines to see if we were violating some rule such as hidden text, link schemes, redirections, keyword stuffing, maleware, duplicate content etc.. and found nothing except little things but maybe we are not good enough to find the problem. In 3 months we have passed from 85 toxic links to 24 and from 750 suspicious links to 300. we have emailed, and call all the webmasters of each site several times to try to delete as many links as possible.We have sent to google a big excel with all our results and attempts to delete those badlinks. We have then sent a reconsideration request explaining all the things that we have verified on-site and off-site but it seems that it didn't worked because we are still penalized. I really hope someone can see where the problem is.
Technical SEO | | andromedical
thank you0 -
Trying to get google to know my site is a magazine site is this wrong
Hi, i have put a line to describe what my site is at the top of my site and i want to know if this is wrong or not. We have dropped frok being number one in google for lifestyle magazine to now number seven. Before we had to redo our site we were number one and then we dropepd to around number four when we finished the site and now we are number seven and i need to try and get back up there. To help google know we are a lifestyle magazine i have put a line at the top of the site and i want to know if this looks out of place and if i should take it down. i need advice on how to get google to know we are a lifestyle magazine and get back in the top five of google my site is www.in2town.co.uk any help would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Sitemap for pages that aren't on menus
I have a site that has pages that has a large number, about 3,000, pages that have static URLs, but no internal links and are not connected to the menu. The pages are pulled up through a user-initiated selection process that builds the URL as they make their selections, but,as I said, the pages already exist with static URLs. The question: should the sitemap for this site include these 3,000 static URLs? There is very little opportunity to optimize the pages in any serious kind of way, if you feel that makes a difference. There is also no chance that a crawler is going to find its way to these pages through the natural flow of the site. There isn't a single link to any of these pages anywhere on the site. Help?
Technical SEO | | RockitSEO0 -
Why aren't certain links showing in SEOMOZ?
Hi, I have been trying to understand our page rank and domains that are linking to us. When I look at the list of linking domains, I see some bigger ones are missing and I don't know why. For example, we are in the Yahoo Directory with a link to trophycentral.com, but SEOMOZ is not showing the link. If SEOMOZ is not seeing it, my guess is Google is not either, which concerns me. There are several onther high page rank domains also not showing. Anyone have any idea why? Thanks! BTW, our domain is trophycentral.com
Technical SEO | | trophycentraltrophiesandawards0 -
Site 'filtered' by Google in early July.... and still filtered!
Hi, Our site got demoted by Google all of a sudden back in early July. You can view the site here: http://alturl.com/4pfrj and you may read the discussions I posted in Google's forums here: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=6e8f9aab7e384d88&hl=en http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=276dc6687317641b&hl=en Those discussions chronicle what happened, and what we've done since. I don't want to make this a long post by retyping it all here, hence the links. However, we've made various changes (as detailed), such as getting rid of duplicate content (use of noindex on various pages etc), and ensuring there is no hidden text (we made an unintentional blunder there through use of a 3rd party control which used CSS hidden text to store certain data). We have also filed reconsideration requests with Google and been told that no manual penalty has been applied. So the problem is down to algorithmic filters which are being applied. So... my reason for posting here is simply to see if anyone here can help us discover if there is anything we have missed? I'd hope that we've addressed the main issues and that eventually our Google ranking will recover (ie. filter removed.... it isn't that we 'rank' poorly, but that a filter is bumping us down, to, for example, page 50).... but after three months it sure is taking a while! It appears that a 30 day penalty was originally applied, as our ranking recovered in early August. But a few days later it dived down again (so presumably Google analysed the site again, found a problem and applied another penalty/filter). I'd hope that might have been 30 or 60 days, but 60 days have now passed.... so perhaps we have a 90 day penalty now. OR.... perhaps there is no time frame this time, simply the need to 'fix' whatever is constantly triggering the filter (that said, I 'feel' like a time frame is there, especially given what happened after 30 days). Of course the other aspect that can always be worked on (and oft-mentioned) is the need for more and more original content. However, we've done a lot to increase this and think our Guide pages are pretty useful now. I've looked at many competitive sites which list in Google and they really don't offer anything more than we do..... so if that is the issue it sure is puzzling if we're filtered and they aren't. Anyway, I'm getting wordy now, so I'll pause. I'm just asking if anyone would like to have a quick look at the site and see what they can deduce? We have of course run it through SEOMoz's tools and made use of the suggestions. Our target pages generally rate as an A for SEO in the reports. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Go2Holidays0