Subtle On-site Factors That Could Cause a Penalty
-
It looks like we have the same penalties on more than one ecommerce site.
What subtle on-site factors can contribute to non-manual penalty, specifically rankings slowly going down for all short tail keywords? And what does it take to pull yourself out of these penalties?
-
Hi again,
This could be dampening Google's view of the site, but I would be interested to see what the link building and other promotional activity of your competitors looks like. DA might not have caught up with what they're doing yet, but the subtle improvements are enough to make the "playing field" a little tougher for you.
When you're being slowly out-done, I'd definitely recommend making sure the site is absolutely perfect from an on-page point of view. If you suspect you're keyword stuffing at all, resolve that and tidy up any other house keeping issues you come across. I don't think that would be enough to take a site from top 3 rankings to page 2, but it won't help if there are other competitive aspects you are being beaten on.
Forgive me for linking to my own post, but I wrote about competitive link analysis a few years ago and it might be helpful if you're looking at what others are doing as far as links go: http://www.ayima.com/seo-knowledge/competitive-backlink-analysis.html
-
You're right, it's not a penalty. Rankings have been slowly dropping over the past 8 months. Many keywords have gone from the top 3 to the second page. Our DA is as strong as the top sites.
I'm wondering if slight keyword stuffing (repeating a keyword once or twice in the title and h1 on a few pages like a title that says "Running Shoes, Walking Shoes" when the page is about all types of shoes) and other on-site factors could be causing this.
-
Hi there,
For sites whose rankings are slowly going down, I would be very hesitant to use the term penalty. Penalties usually result in large, noticeable drops - more than 10 places lost at once and huge percentages of traffic gone "overnight". If several sites are losing one or two positions a week, it is more likely that competitor activity is taking place at a higher rate or quality.
There are a myriad of things competitors could be doing to slowly push ahead - the usual suspect is better / more link building: competing is not about matching competitors link for links, but rather:
- Acquiring links at a faster rate
- Acquiring more relevant links
- Acquiring better-quality links (a BBC link as opposed to a link from a hobby blogger, etc.)
If link activity isn't the answer, so many other reasons can account for slow drops. Pagination issues resulting in duplicate content may not be enough for Google to outright penalise a site using its Panda algorithm, but they could be enough to make a site look like it was lower-quality and didn't deserve to rank as well as a tidy, well-optimised site.
Heavy "mentions" from around the web (e.g. the Telegraph mentioning a company 10 times in one month without linking to it) are positive signals, as is heavy social media activity and interaction.
What is the rate at which these sites lose rankings? I'd like to know a little more about how quickly they're dropping in order to think more about the "penalty" potential.
Thanks,
Jane
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
-
How long before our website bounce back after Google Penalty?
One of our client websites got recently hacked. In a span of 4 days, it received random backlinks from random websites with random anchor texts. We are already in good standing for some of the keywords we are tracking and the attack got us a penalty from Google and we lost our rankings, moving out of the top 500. We already disavowed these dirty backlinks though we never really diagnosed where these came from. How long do you think our client's website will bounce back from the penalty?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SirAdri110 -
Does ID's in URL is good for SEO? Will SEO Submissions sites allow such urls submissions?
Example url: http://public.beta.travelyaari.com/vrl-travels-13555-online It's our sites beta URL, We are going to implement it for our site. After implementation, it will be live on travelyaari.com like this - "https://www.travelyaari.com/vrl-travels-13555-online". We have added the keywords etc in the URL "VRL Travels". But the problems is, there are multiple VRL travels available, so we made it unique with a unique id in URL - "13555". So that we can exactly get to know which VRL Travels and it is also a solution for url duplication. Also from users / SEO point of view, the url has readable texts/keywords - "vrl travels online". Can some Moz experts suggest me whether it will affect SEO performance in any manner? SEO Submissions sites will accept this URL? Meanwhile, I had tried submitting this URL to Reddit etc. It got accepted.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RobinJA0 -
WP Datar site shady linking to my site
Hello, I have done some research on this but cannot find a solid answer to my question. After recently reviewing my "not found" errors in webmaster tools, I see that a site called "WP Datar" has linked to a number of our pages that actually do not exist. I am wondering first, if this will harm our site, and second, what is the best way to get those links from their site taken down? I tried emailing, but of course, the email address listed on the site did not work. 🙂 Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | lfrazer0 -
Partner Site In Bound Links
We have a staffing agency client that uses a 3rd party site (with different URL) to display open jobs for web viewers to see. However we are getting a bunch of backlinks from this site from the footer because it is set up as a White Label... Should I add a rel=nofollow to the links in the footer? Disavow the links from the site? Do nothing? I am not really sure. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Aqabatech0 -
Partial Match Penalty Site - Move Portion & Redirect To New Site
So I have a site that currently has a partial match penalty from google, I have been working to get it removed...Bad SEO basically my site was submitted to a bunch of bad blog networks..Hopefully it gets lifted soon as we remove and disavow links. That said I was planning on moving a portion of my site to a new site since its not really the focus of the site anymore however still pays the bills. I have also have been building it more of a network of sites..So If I do that and 301 redirect the pages I moved, will the penalty carry? On the current site I planned on using Rel no follow to any links that I may change in the header/menus etc.. Some of these pages I believe have the penalty while others dont. I really just dont want to screw anything else up more then it is? My biggest fear is that its perceived as a blackhat method or something like that? Any thoughts?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dueces0 -
Do some sites get preference over others by Google just because? Grandfathered theory
So I have a theory that Google "grandfathers" in a handful of old websites from every niche and that no matter what the site does, it will always get the authority to rank high for the relevant keywords in the niche. I have a website in the crafts/cards/printables niche. One of my competitors is http://printable-cards.gotfreecards.com/ This site ranks for everything... http://www.semrush.com/info/gotfreecards.com+(by+organic) Yet, when I go to visit their site, I notice duplicate content all over the place (extremely thin content, if anything at all for some pages that rank for highly searched keywords), I see paginated pages that should be getting noindexed, bad URL structure and I see an overall unfriendly user experience. Also, the backlink profile isn't very impressive, as most of the good links are coming from their other site, www.got-free-ecards.com. Can someone tell me why this site is ranking for what it is other than the fact that it's around 5 years old and potentially has some type of preference from Google?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
If our site hasn't been hit with the Phantom Update, are we clear?
Our SEO provider created a bunch of "unique url" websites that have direct match domain names. The content is pretty much the same for over 130 websites (city name is different) that link directly to our main site. For me this was a huge red flag, but when I questioned them and they said it was fine. We haven't seen a drop in traffic, but concerned that Google just hasn't gotten to us. DA for each of these sites are 1 after several months. Should we be worried? I think yes, but I am an SEO newbie.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Buddys0 -
"Unnatural Linking" Warning/Penalty - Anyone's company help with overcoming this?
I have a few sites where I didn't manage the quality of my vendors and now am staring at some GWT warnings for unnatural linking. I'm assuming a penalty is coming down the pipe and unfortunately these aren't my sites so looking to get on the ball with unwinding anything we can as soon as possible. Does anyone's company have experience or could pass along a reference to another company who successfully dealt with these issues? A few items coming to mind include solid and speedy processes to removing offending links, and properly dealing with the resubmission request?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | b2bmarketer0