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
-
Redirecting an Entire Site to a Page on Another Site?
So I have a site that I want to shut down http://vowrenewalsmaui.com and redirect to a dedicated Vow Renewals page I am making on this site here: https://simplemauiwedding.net. My main question is: I don't want to lose all the authority of the pages and if I just redirect the site using my domain registrar's 301 redirect it will only redirect the main URL not all of the supporting pages, to my knowledge. How do I not lose all the authority of the supporting pages and still shut down the site and close down my site builder? I know if I leave the site up I can redirect all of the individual pages to corresponding pages on the other site, but I want to be done with it. Just trying to figure out if there is a better way than I know of. The domain is hosted through GoDaddy.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | photoseo10 -
Start a new site to get out of Google penalties?
Hey Moz, I have several questions in regards to whether I should a start a new second site to save my online presence after a series of Google penalties. The main questions being: Is this the best way to spend my time/resources? If I’m forced to jump my company over to the new site can Google see that and transfer the penalty? I plan on all new content (no link redirect, no dup content) so do I need to kill the original site? Are there any Pro’s/cons I am missing? Summary of my situation: Looking at analytics it appears I was hit with both Penguin 2.0 and 2.1, each cutting my traffic in half, despite a link remediation campaign in the summer of 2013. There was a manual penalty also imposed on the site in the fall of 2013, which was released in early 2014. With Penguin 3.0’s release at the end of 2014, the site saw a slight uptick in organic traffic, improving from essentially nothing to next to nothing. Most of the site’s issues revolved around cheap $5 links from India in the 2006-09 time frame. This link building was abandoned, and replaced with nothing but “letting them happen naturally” from 2010 through the 2013 penalties. Since 2013 we have done a small amount of quality articles on a monthly basis to promote the site, social media, and continuous link remediation. In addition the whole site has been redesigned, optimized for speed/mobile, secured, and completely rewritten. Given all of this, the site has really only recovered to page 2 and 3 of the SERPs for our key words. Even after a highly circulated piece appeared on an Authority site (97 DA) a few months ago there was zero movement. It appears we have an anvil tied around our leg until Penguin 4.0. With all of the above, and no sign of when the next penguin will be released, I ask, is it time to start investing in a new site? With no movement in 2.5 years, it’s impossible to know where my current site stands, so I don’t know what else I can do to improve it. I am considering slowly building a new site that is a high quality informational site. My thought process is it will take a year for a new site to gain any traction with Google. If by that time my main site has not recovered, I can jump to that new site, add a commercial component, and use it as a life boat for my company. If I have recovered, then I have a future asset. Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheDude0 -
If I put a piece of content on an external site can I syndicate to my site later using a rel=canonical link?
Could someone help me with a 'what if ' scenario please? What happens if I publish a piece of content on an external website, but then later decide to also put this content on my website. I want my website to rank first for this content, even though the original location for the content was the external website. Would it be okay for me to put a rel=canonical tag on the external website's content pointing to the copy on my website? Or would this be seen as manipulative?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO1 -
Spammy sites that link to a site
Hello, What is the best and quickest way to identify spammy sites that link to a website, and then remove them ( google disavow?) Thank you dear Moz, community - I appreciate your help 🙂 Sincerely, Vijay
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vijayvasu0 -
Switching from Google Plus Local to Google Plus Business
Greetings, We have a website design firm located in India. We wanted to target customers in our city who are looking for website design locally. And with google plus local and a few content marketing would get us into first page very soon because none in the competition is using social signals or even content marketing. BUT unfortunately from last month even though our Google Places is verified we cant verify our Google Local Plus page https://plus.google.com/b/116513400635428782065/ It just shows error 500. Its a bug and its been a year for people without it being addressed. So we are skeptical if our strategy would work without Google+. At the least we decided we would just make company local page and connect it with website. But it might not have effect as local. So we are still unsure which step to take either to wait for google to fix it.(feedbacks emails calls nothing worked) OR We start the process with Google Business Category.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hard0 -
Separate Site or should we incorporate it into our main site
Hello, We have a website to sell personal development trainings. The owners want to start 2 blogs - one for each owner - that promotes their personal coaching practices. What's the SEO advantages of embedding both blogs in the current site vs starting 2 brand new blogs with their names as the domain names?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Linking to bad sites
Hi, I just have a quick question. Is it very negative to link to "bad" sites, such as online pharmacies, dating, adult sites, that sort of stuff? How much does linking to a "bad" site negatively affect a "good" site? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | salvyy0 -
Google Places verification
What advice do you have for achieving verification for Google Places for a client? I have a client at the moment and I tried getting the call sent through and I'm not sure what happened but a couple of tries at this did not work. I've tried the post card way and I'm still waiting. Do I need to be more patient in Australia for this verification post card? Is there a way I can verify the info myself? note: I have set up a seperate email that there business email to handle a lot of the link building but this is different to there business email which Google uses.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iSenseWebSolutions0