Is my site penalized by Google?
-
Let's say my website is aaaaa.com and company name is aaaaa Systems. When I search Google aaaaa my site do not come up at all. When I search for "aaaaa Systems" it comes up. But in WMT I see quite a few clicks from aaaaa as keyword. Most of the traffic is brand keywords only. I never received any manual penalty in WMT ever. Is the site penalized or regular algorithm issues?
-
Thank you Gary for your effort and great insight.
I didn't realize we were ranking in Google search sites other than Google.com . But it explains why WMT says we are getting some traffic from Google. Unfortunately we are not showing up for our own domain for the term "Armia" for almost an year now. So it is not a regular recalculation.
This is our main corporate site. Most of the blog updates and social channels are updated through two different product sites. The social channels connected is our own product site
Good point the keywords. May be it is time to retire it. I knew Google stopped taking them into account. I didnt know it impacts adversely.
Thanks again Gary.
Aji
-
Hello,
From what i understand i face a similar problem, you can see the topic here!
I believe that your site is not penalized but something else is going wrong. I am still looking to find whats wrong
-
Interesting, I found your site via your linked in account and was able to test what you were saying.
Interestingly I see that you rank as expected in all Google search sites except google.com?gl=us
When in the Google US results your site comes up in 48th place for your careers page. Not your homepage, this makes me wonder if Google is just doing some re-indexing of your homepage. How long have you noticed this? Sometimes with excessive link building or marketing it can cause a page to temporarily disappear for some keywords.
On the subject of keywords, you are using the the keywords meta tag, considering you have such little content on your homepage it is not wise to keep this tag and Google has said for many years now that it is not used and has been thought to be used negatively by Google bot.
If your ranking has disappeared for just a few days then be patient for a few more.
I noticed your name is not a madeup name it means army in Polish and it is also a Polish punk rock band. I do wonder if there is some confusion there when you look at the other results showing. But my instinct is that your homepage is just being recalculated for some reason. I see this happen all the time to my site when my rankings are about to change significantly in a positive way.
I would also look at putting your contact information on the homepage into rich snippets to help Google identify you correctly.
Also your blog has not been updated for 1 year
Also I see that your social media buttons on the bottom of your site do not go to the correct sites, it looks like it points to the social media site of the websites template creator?
I hope some of this helps you.
-
Thank you Moosa.
But the first word is a madeup word without much competition. And our name was ranking in the first 2-3 spots for years. Now it suddenly removed from first 100 positions.
-
Thank you Bryan , Gary for your thoughtful responses.
The website is not removed from index. I get few hundred visitors per month Google through brand key words. When I do site: I see most of my pages in the index. So it is not removed from index. WMT even reports the my page rank for my domain without tld as 2.5.
The domainname without tld is not very competitive, it is a a made up name.
I tried without any personalization in google with https://www.google.com/search?pws=0 . Still no change though.
-
No let’s say your company name is “Marketing Systems” if you type the world marketing you don’t show up and it perfectly make sense because it’s too competitive keyword and it’s indeed really difficult to get a first page position.
From the situation that you mentioned in your question, it didn’t seems like a penalty it’s just that the first name is competitive and you are not ranking for it!
Just my 2 Cents!
-
Are the words competitive keywords or are they unique to your brand? If they are competitive its possible you don't have the power to rank for them or Google thinks you have an EMD or are link building those keywords excessively. Without seeing the site its hard to answer otherwise.
-
Hey AJLabs!
For starters (if you haven't already), try using the "site:" command in Google.
Example, instead of just searching for "aaaaa" or "aaaaa.com", type "site:aaaaa.com" into Google and see what it yields. This will tell you whether or not you've been completely removed from their index or not. But being that you are seeing clicks in WMT and when you type your brand in you find yourself, I don't think you've been penalized. Would there be any reason you can think of that you'd have been issued a penalty? Sorry for the edits. I always rethink my answers after the fact haa
Hope this helps!
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
-
Can Google read content/see links on subscription sites?
If an article is published on The Times (for example), can Google by-pass the subscription sign-in to read the content and index the links in the article? Example: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/life/property/overseas/article4245346.ece In the above article there is a link to the resort's website but you can't see this unless you subscribe. I checked the source code of the page with the subscription prompt present and the link isn't there. Is there a way that these sites deal with search engines differently to other user agents to allow the content to be crawled and indexed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CustardOnlineMarketing0 -
Blocking Certain Site Parameters from Google's Index - Please Help
Hello, So we recently used Google Webmaster Tools in an attempt to block certain parameters on our site from showing up in Google's index. One of our site parameters is essentially for user location and accounts for over 500,000 URLs. This parameter does not change page content in any way, and there is no need for Google to index it. We edited the parameter in GWT to tell Google that it does not change site content and to not index it. However, after two weeks, all of these URLs are still definitely getting indexed. Why? Maybe there's something we're missing here. Perhaps there is another way to do this more effectively. Has anyone else ran into this problem? The path we used to implement this action:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jbake
Google Webmaster Tools > Crawl > URL Parameters Thank you in advance for your help!0 -
How do I know what pages of my site is not inedexed by google ?
Hi I my Google webmaster tools under Crawl->sitemaps it shows 1117 pages submitted but 619 has been indexed. Is there any way I can fined which pages are not indexed and why? it has been like this for a while. I also have a manual action (partial) message. "Unnatural links to your site--impacts links" and under affects says "Some incoming links" is that the reason Google does not index some of my pages? Thank you Sina
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SinaKashani0 -
Site Structure: How do I deal with a great user experience that's not the best for Google's spiders?
We have ~3,000 photos that have all been tagged. We have a wonderful AJAXy interface for users where they can toggle all of these tags to find the exact set of photos they're looking for very quickly. We've also optimized a site structure for Google's benefit that gives each category a page. Each category page links to applicable album pages. Each album page links to individual photo pages. All pages have a good chunk of unique text. Now, for Google, the domain.com/photos index page should be a directory of sorts that links to each category page. Alternatively, the user would probably prefer the AJAXy interface. What is the best way to execute this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tatermarketing0 -
Site not progressing at all....
We relaunched our site almost a year ago after our old site dropped out of ranking due to what we think was overused anchor text.... We transferred over the content to the new site, but started fresh in terms of links etc. And did not redirect the old site. Since the launch we have focused on producing good content and social, but the site has made no progress at all. The only factor I can think off is that one site linked to us from all of their pages, which we asked them to remove which they did over 3 months ago, but still showing in Webmaster tools.... Any help would be appreciated. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jj34340 -
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 -
Google Maps results doesn't show my site url but rather the maps url, why is this?
For several of my clients landing pages that show up in the Maps results the website url has been overwritten by the maps url (maps.google.com). Even though on my places page I have the correct website set up. Does anyone have any idea why they would be doing this and how I can correct it? Thanks kinldy in advance, Aaron. maps-url.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | afranklin0 -
Do sites with a small number of content pages get penalized by Google?
If my site has just five content pages, instead of 25 or 50, then will it get penalized by Google for a given moderately competitive keyword?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RightDirection0