How to know if your site has been penalized by Google
-
Hello,
One of my clients ranking drop dramatically.
We believe it was due to an upgrade to his site.While the site was live www.clientdomain.com
Work was being done on the new site www.clientdomain.com/new (1 month)I think google crawled the /new link and took as a content duplication since both sites had the same content.
Is there a MOZ tool to see if a site has been penalized or any online tool?
Thanks
-
SEO student is correct re where manual or partial manual penalties will appear. As to your real problem, I do not think it is a manual penalty. I think you have messed things up with trying to build a new site on the old while it is still up. Is there a reason you did not build the new site on a dev domain : OliversDevDomain.com/clientsite? Get the site where you want it and then simply repoint the domain.
Probably, you have 'confused' things with the search engines by having duped content, and/or you have redirects that are 404ing, etc. Have you run the site on screaming frog or similar software to see what you have? That would be my first move, then I would make a change in how I was rebuilding. It is likely, if the rebuild is complete and you no longer have duplicate content (and the url structure is unchanged) you will likely pop back into the rankings fairly soon.
I would be disingenuous if I did not say that given the approach to the redesign, it is likely there are other issues. If you have a baseline crawl of the old site to compare to the new that would be helpful.
Good luck with this,
Robert
-
Hi Oliver,
If Google has penalised the site for duplicate content it will appear in Google Webmaster Tools under a section called Manual Actions on the left hand side.
Configure Google Webmaster Tools to the site and once installed that is the place to log into and take a look!
Good luck!
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
-
Site Migration - Pagination
Hi, We are migrating our website and an issue we are facing is how to handle paginated content in our categories. Our new website will have the same structure but with different urls. Should we 301 redirect all the paginated content (if crawled by Google) to the url of the main category? To put this into an example: Old urls: www.example.com/technology/tvs (main category of TVs & also page 1) ** www.example.com/technology/tvs?v=0&page=2 ** ( page 2 of TVs) New urls: **www.example.com/soundvision/tvs **(main category of TVs & also page 1) **www.example.com/soundvision/tvs?page=2 **(page 2 of tvs) Should we redirect all of the old TV urls (also the paginated) to www.example.com/soundvision/tvs ? The is no rel next, prev tag in our site and no canonicals. Also there is a view all products page in each category, BUT it doesn't contain all the products(max. is 100 per page - yes the view all page is also paginated). The same view all products page (paginated) will exist in the new website also. I checked google search console, and Google has decided to treat as canonical page the first page www.example.com/technology/tvs . Also, all the organic traffic of our categories goes to these pages (main category page - 1st page). I would appreciate any thoughts on this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HellasSITES0 -
301 old site to new site?
I have client with an old site - www.bestfamilylawattorney.com - which had a lot of spammy links (and bad rankings). Instead of fixing those issues, we started a new URL - www.berenjifamilylaw.com - with new content and redesign. Should I do a 301 redirect from old to new domain? If the old site was being penalized, would a 301 transfer that penalty? I just want to make sure I don't end up hurting the new site after doing all the work to start fresh. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrodriguez14400 -
Google+ Page Question
Just started some work for a new client, I created a Google+ page and a connected YouTube page, then proceeded to claim a listing for them on google places for business which automatically created another Google+ page for the business listing. What do I do in this situation? Do I delete the YouTube page and Google+ page that I originally made and then recreate them using the Google+ page that was automatically created or do I just keep both pages going? If the latter is the case, do I use the same information to populate both pages and post the same content to both pages? That doesn't seem like it would be efficient or the right way to go about handling this but I could be wrong.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | goldbergweismancairo0 -
Micro sites?
Hi, I have been speaking to seo firms regarding strategies and they mentioned setting up micro sites under domains that are relevant. i.e setting up armanidoamin.co.uk and we use it as a blog type site to update all info, product reviews, news relating to armani. Whats peoples thoughts on this? Does it work? Is it worth the effort? Im not so sure but obviously looking for ideas. Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YNWA0 -
Does google penalize for banner ads?
client has banners on site 1 linking to site 2 and vice-versa but these links are auto generated with each blog post ( new post means new ad link) is this a problem? see, its not like he just has one banner on reach site pointing back to the other - his ads automatically appear on each page that a blog post is posted - im sure you know what i mean but im trying to to my best to make sense here everytime another blog post is created for site 1 then another banner is also created linking to site 2 client thinks it may be a big problem - is it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ezpro90 -
How can we get a site reconsidered for Google indexing?
We recently completed a re-design for a site and are having trouble getting it indexed. This site may have been penalized previously. They were having issues getting it ranked and the design was horrible. Any advise on how to get the new site reconsidered to get the rank where it should be? (Yes, Webmaster Tools is all set up with the sitemap linked) Many thanks for any help with this one!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | d25kart0 -
Will this get penalized by google?
I had a thought recently, and perhaps it is a pretty bad thought, but i don't see the flaw in it, or how google would really detect it, so please correct me where I am wrong here. Say we ran some sort of marketing campeign and through that campeign we created about 100 extra pages on our domain. A lot of these pages are heavily shared on facebook, twitter, google+ etc. These pages also have several backlinks here and there. Now this campaign is over and so these pages no longer seem relevant to us. If we were to add 301 redirects to all these pages, to three different (and unrelated) internal pages (our primary targets) would this pass all the accumulated link juice on to those three target internal pages? Or would this behaviour get penalized by google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adriandg0 -
Does anyone know if certain DMOZ categories are blocked/never get indexed on google?
Hi all, After waiting many months I was happy to see a certain site listed on DMOZ, then months later still haven't seen the dmoz category indexed in google. It makes me wonder if certain categories don't get indexed or blocked or even previously penalized by google. The category in question is a regional one : http://www.dmoz.org/Regional/North_America/United_States/New_Jersey/Localities/G/Garfield/Business_and_Economy/ Anyone come across this before? Dave
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | davebrown19750