Help with 50 Plus Penalty, No Manual Action Reported
-
We have a client who had been ranking in Google’s top ten organic results for 2 of his major keywords last year. Currently Bing and Yahoo ranks his site #1 for both of these terms; the ranking pages that are appearing were specifically targeted with these words.
As of now, the client appears to have a 50 plus penalty for these two keywords. Appearing #76 for one term and # 60 for the other.
We were thinking of submitting a reconsideration request through Google Webmaster tools, but discovered that you aren’t allowed to do that unless a Manual Action has appeared, which in this case has not.
The only problem we’ve had with the site from an SEO standpoint is that we recently discovered a website that had copied some of the product descriptions verbatim. The client contacted the site owner who took it down immediately (about a month ago), but we still have not seen any improvement in rankings for these keywords.
Does anyone have any ideas on how to communicate this Google and get the suspected penalty lifted if a reconsideration request is apparently not available?
-
You've probably solved this already, but you first need to figure out whether it's a Panda or a Penguin penalty. This is probably a link-based penalty, but I can't say without seeing the site. If so, you'll want to work on link removal. A good place to start are on links with a high spam score. Try to get them removed, and add any spammy/purchased links to a disavow.
Let me know if you still need some eyes on it.
-
It's an older term, but usually used to refer to when your website dropped by around 50 spots in G. It's not fun & here's a webmasterworld breakdown of one: http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4366131.htm
-
Pardon my ignorance but what's a 50 plus penalty?
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
-
URL Errors Help - 350K Page Not Founds in 22 days
Got a good one for you all this time... For our site, Google Search Console is reporting 436,758 "Page Not Found" errors within the Crawl Error report. This is an increase of 350,000 errors in just 22 days (on Sept 21 we had 87,000 errors which was essentially consistently at that number for the previous 4 months or more). Then on August 22nd the errors jumped to 140,000, then climbed steadily from the 26th until the 31st reaching 326,000 errors, and then climbed again slowly from Sept 2nd until today's 436K. Unfortunately I can only see the top 1,000 erroneous URLs in the console, of which they seem to be custom Google tracking URLs my team uses to track our pages. A few questions: 1. Is there anyway to see the full list of 400K URLs Google is reporting they cannot find?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | usnseomoz
2. Should we be concerned at all about these?
3. Any other advice? thanks in advance! C0 -
Google Penalty Checker Tool
What is the best tool to check for the google penalty, What penalty hit the website. ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Michael.Leonard0 -
Number of indexed pages dropped. No manual action though?
I have a client who had their WordPress site hacked. At that point there was no message from Google in webmaster tools and the search results for their pages still looked normal. They paid sitelock to fix the site. This was all about a month ago. Logging into Webmaster Tools now there are still no messages from Google nor anything on the manual actions page. Their organic traffic is essentially gone. Looking at the submitted sitemap only 3 of their 121 submitted pages are indexed. Before this all of them where in the index. Looking at the index status report I can see that the number of indexed pages dropped completely off the map. We are sure that the site is free of malware. This client has done no fishy SEO practices. What can be done?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | connectiveWeb0 -
Can Google penalize your site without sending you a Manual Spam Action?
I had a massive drop in traffic in Mid 2013, and a slow reduction since then. It has sort of leveled off now, but it's not exactly climbing I've never received a manual spam action. The answer to my question seems pretty obvious, now that I write it out... but have you heard of anyone getting penalized, without specifically receiving a warning? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidC.0 -
Need help with duplicate content. Same content; different locations.
We have 2 sites that will have duplicate content (e.g., one company that sells the same products under two different brand names for legal reasons). The two companies are in different geographical areas, but the client will put the same content on each page because they're the same product. What is the best way to handle this? Thanks a lot.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rocket.Fuel0 -
Help needed on Google Webmaster tools
Hi I notice that one of my oldest sites , even if I put hundred of backlinks (good or bad) google webmaster tools never index more like 20 per day. Why is this happening? They control it? I mean they dont let them all to get indexed and they take it slowly slowly? If I put just 20 per day is the ideal link building amount? Thnk you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nyanainc0 -
Bing Penalty
I am working with a client who apparently has been penalized by Bing. The site has been around for many years and they are an industry leader in their field. The site was previously indexed and received a substantial amount of traffic from Bing. Last week the site disappeared from Bing's index. A site: and url: search both show no results. Does anyone have a significant amount of knowledge or experience related to Bing penalties? Here is what I have done so far: http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2009/03/19/getting-out-of-the-penalty-box.aspx This 2009 article states Bing's Summary Tool offers a "Site Status" section with a "Blocked" indicator which informs webmasters if a site is penalized. I have seen it before a long time ago, but apparently the field no longer exists. Is there a definitive means of determining if Bing has manually penalized a site besides a response from their Content Inclusion Request? Danny Sullivan wrote a great article about how Bing removed some sites for thin content last month. It seems two of the sites which were a focus of the article have been re-included in Bing's index. Bing claims an algorithm change where Danny seems skeptical. Either way this could be the same issue. http://searchengineland.com/bing-bans-holiday-deals-sites-102856 there are two recent complaints on Bing's forums about a similar issue where various webmasters shared their sites have been removed. There are no responses to these posts from Bing: http://www.bing.com/community/webmaster/f/12252/p/670360/9665163.aspx#9665163 and http://www.bing.com/community/webmaster/f/12252/t/670550.aspx?PageIndex=1 (the comments are relevant but not the initial post). Any ideas or suggestions would be helpful.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RyanKent0 -
I'm not sure why SEOMoz is reporting duplicate content
I have thousands of duplicate page content errors on my site, but I'm not exactly sure why. For example, the crawl is reporting this page - http://www.fantasytoyland.com/2011-glee-costumes.html is a duplicate of this page - http://www.fantasytoyland.com/2011-jersey-shore-costumes.html . All of these products are unique to the page - what is causing it to flag as duplicate content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FutureMemoriesInc0