Is my site being penalized?
-
I've gone through all the points on https://moz.com/blog/technical-site-audit-for-2015 but the site only ranks for its brand name after months. The website is not ranking in the top 100 for any main keywords (2,3,4 word phrases), only for a handful of very long phrases (4+).
All of the content is unique, all pages are indexed, the website is fast and doesn't contain any crawl errors and there are a couple of links pointing to it.
There is a sitewide follow link in the footer pointing to another domain, its parent company and vice-versa. This is not done for any SEO reasons but the companies are related and also the products are supplementary of each other. Could this be an issue? Or is my site being penalized by something else?
-
Micha,
After looking at your site and running a few quick tests, I still don't think your site has been penalized. You have a few technical and on-page issues to deal with, but I don't think fixing these alone will catapult you to the top of the SERPs.
I checked the SERPs for "climb kilimanjaro," and I think your competition is your biggest hurdle. In addition to being around a lot longer, your competitor's websites have far more targeted, editorial backlinks, and consequently much higher authority, than your site.
Unfortunately, there's no quick and easy fix for this problem. You'll have to work toward earning good backlinks. Check out the resources below.
-
Hi All,
Thank you for your answers. I'm glad to hear that most of you think that the single sitewide link wouldn't caused a penalty from Google. If this wouldn't be allowed by Google, how else could one promote their other related sites?
@Laura: To give a bit more information, the domain was registered in November 2014 and the website including content has been live since the beginning of 2015. I realize that this is not long ago but I've seen a lot more progress for other domains by this stage. There has some link building happened over the last months; initially a handful of strong directories, partners and a couple of articles (not indexed by OSE yet). Furthermore, we are asking past customers to leave reviews on various website and mention us if they have a blog or written a trip report somewhere. The website is of a tour operator that organizes trekking tours up Kilimanjaro. For more information you can visit the web address www.kilimanjaro-experience.com. I would be very intrigued to hear your advice on this matter.
@Patrick: Thanks for the resources! I'll go through them. WMT hasn't indicated that there are any manual actions and OSE indicates a spam score of only 2.
@Andy: Nofollow might be a good idea if this is the issue though. I've done some digging into the competition's links and besides 2 very strong links it's all a bit average and some even quite spammy with links in comments etc. I definitely don't want to go that route. Got any good contacts at renowned newspapers?
-
Hi Micha,
I doubt very much that a single link like this is causing you issues, but there would be no harm in no-following it, just to be on the safe side.
and there are a couple of links pointing to it.
You might find that this is playing a major part. It is possible for a site to rank without links, but the content would have to be pretty amazing and really tick all the boxes for Google.
Do you feel the content on you site would be classified as a linkable asset? Would what is there be reason enough for others to want to link to you? Have you had a look at those who are winning in the SERPs to see where they get their links from, and why? A little competition analysis might open up a sea of opportunities, or at least let you see what needs doing.
-Andy
-
Hi there
If everything you say is true - highly doubtful. But run through the technical checklist one more time in case there is a noindex tag or an issue with your robots.txt.
You have to be doing some pretty shady content and link building tactics in order to trip Google penalty signals. I would go through any links you have to see if there are spammy efforts there (resource below)
However, to be sure, login to your Webmaster Tools account and check your manual action notifications.
If nothing there, I would look at the following materials:
How To Do a Content Audit - Step-by-Step (Moz)
How to Conduct a Link Audit (SEW)
Link Audit Guide for Effective Link Removals & Risk Mitigation (Moz)
How to Perform the Ultimate Local SEO Audit (Moz)
The Illustrated SEO Competitive Analysis Workflow (Moz - I put this here for ideas, not copycat tactics)
Conducting Market Research Before Investing in Tactical Execution (Moz)I would also look and see if there are any opportunities to amplify your content or if there are any advertising opportunities that can help get your name out there and help you relationship build with potential partners.
Lastly, while tedious, I highly recommend persona development - reason being, going through the exercise is necessary and you learn more than ever about who your audience is; there may be content or ideas that you are missing out on.
Like I said, if you are up to par with the checklist and you have value on your website, go through the above resources as they can help you build your brand and get more traction going. It's an uphill battle, but one worth fighting when all is said and done.
Hope this all helps! Good luck!
-
I doubt that a single sitewide reciprocal footer link is causing your site to be penalized. There are dozens of possible reasons why your site is not ranking, and it's impossible to say what's going on without knowing the website in question. If you don't want to post it here, send me the URL in a private message and I'll take a look.
- How long has your site been online?
- Has anyone conducted a link building campaign for you at any time? If so, what did they do?
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
-
Has this site been a victim of negative seo?
The rankings for our client's site - www.yourlifeprotected.co.uk fell off the face of the earth back in June. Despite trying a huge number of things to try and help the site recover, we've seen no real positive improvements since then. Examples of things we have tried: Disavowed & manually removed poor quality Links Removed any internal Duplicate Content Removed any broken links Re-written all website content to ensure unique & high quality No-Followed all outbound links Added any missing title tags changed hosting Rewritten content to ensure no duplication internally or externally The most recent issue we've picked up is that some highly spammy sites seem to have copied extracts of text from the website and hidden them in their pages. This is a rather puzzling one, as there aren't backlinks, pointing to our site - just the copy. For example - Cancer Page and Diabetes Page.It feels very much as though this could be a negative SEO attack which could be responsible for the drop in rankings and traffic the site has experienced. If this is the case, what can we do about it?! Having already re-written the copy on the site, we obviously dont want to do this again unnecessarily - especially if this could just happen again in future! Any help or advice would be hugely appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Digirank0 -
New Section On Site Worth It?
We have been kicking around this idea for a while now, and I wanted to get the communities honest opinion before we begin building it. So we create a lot of posts on social media showcasing articles we find on SEO, tips and tricks, reviews, etc. We were thinking rather than always linking out to the other sites, we are going to create a section on our site called "From Around The Web" and have brief breakdowns of what was covered, then provide a link to the full article. Most of these would be between 300-500 words, and be optimized around what we were linking to and writing about. So since the content would not be "in-depth" would this hurt us in any way? To me, it doesnt not make sense to send people to the other article right away, when we can summarize it and link to the full articles from our site. (Most people dont want to read a 3000 word article on SEO, especially small business owners who just want the breakdown) Thoughts? Think it will help, or not be useful enough to invest labor in?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | David-Kley0 -
Technical Site Questions
When i do a google cache of our site, i see 2 menus, our developers say that's because the 2nd is for the mobile menu - is that correct, as when i look up other sites that have mobile rendering they only have one menu visible. Plus GWT's has the number of internal links per page at least x2 what they should have - are they connected? Secondly when i do a spider test through http://tools.seobook.com/general/spider-test/ it shows all "behind the scenes text" eg font names, portals, sliders, margins - "font size px" is shown as 17 times and a density of 2.15% - surely this isnt correct as google will be thinking that these are my keywords !? My site is www.over50choices.co.uk Thanks Ash
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AshShep10 -
What do I do about sites that copy my content?
I've noticed that there are a number of websites that are copying my content. They are putting the full article on their site, mentioning that it was reposted from my site, but contains no links to me. How should I approach this? What are my rights and should I ask them to remove it or add a link? Will the duplicate content affect me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
Strange situation - Started over with a new site. WMT showing the links that previously pointed to old site.
I have a client whose site was severely affected by Penguin. A former SEO company had built thousands of horrible anchor texted links on bookmark pages, forums, cheap articles, etc. We decided to start over with a new site rather than try to recover this one. Here is what we did: -We noindexed the old site and blocked search engines via robots.txt -Used the Google URL removal tool to tell it to remove the entire old site from the index -Once the site was completely gone from the index we launched the new site. The new site had the same content as the old other than the home page. We changed most of the info on the home page because it was duplicated in many directory listings. (It's a good site...the content is not overoptimized, but the links pointing to it were bad.) -removed all of the pages from the old site and put up an index page saying essentially, "We've moved" with a nofollowed link to the new site. We've slowly been getting new, good links to the new site. According to ahrefs and majestic SEO we have a handful of new links. OSE has not picked up any as of yet. But, if we go into WMT there are thousands of links pointing to the new site. WMT has picked up the new links and it looks like it has all of the old ones that used to point at the old site despite the fact that there is no redirect. There are no redirects from any pages of the old to the new at all. The new site has a similar name. If the old one was examplekeyword.com, the new one is examplekeywordcity.com. There are redirects from the other TLD's of the same to his (i.e. examplekeywordcity.org, examplekeywordcity.info), etc. but no other redirects exist. The chances that a site previously existed on any of these TLD's is almost none as it is a unique brand name. Can anyone tell me why Google is seeing the links that previously pointed to the old site as now pointing to the new? ADDED: Before I hit the send button I found something interesting. In this article from dejan SEO where someone stole Rand Fishkin's content and ranked for it, they have the following line: "When there are two identical documents on the web, Google will pick the one with higher PageRank and use it in results. It will also forward any links from any perceived ’duplicate’ towards the selected ‘main’ document." This may be what is happening here. And just to complicate things further, it looks like when I set up the new site in GA, the site owner took the GA tracking code and put it on the old page. (The noindexed one that is set up with a nofollowed link to the new one.) I can't see how this could affect things but we're removing it. Confused yet? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes0 -
2 sites or one sites: 2 locations
Hello, I have a dog training client who is offering services in 2 separate locations. We're looking to be first in the non-local search results and also rank well in google places. Would it be better to go for 2 separate sites or one site and try to rank for 2 different locations with one site? There's both local and standard search results when we type in our keywords. Thanks!
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 -
A Site in Flash to Optimize
Hello, I have to understand if this site www.spacemilanmodels.com.pt can be optimize since the entire website is in flash wich is not good for optimizacion. What do you guys suggest? Recommendations? Is it possible only with link-building? Tks for the help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PedroM0