Google Manual Penalty Lifted - Why is my website still decreasing on traffic?
-
Hi there,
I was hoping that somebody has a potential answer to this or if anyone else has experienced this issue.
Our website has recently hit by a manual penalty (structured data wasn't matching the content on the page)
After working hard on this to fix the issue across the site, we submitted a reconsideration request which was approved by Google a few days later.
I understand that not all websites recover and it doesn't guarantee rankings will go back to normal, but it seems as if the traffic is continuing to drop at an even quicker rate.
There's a number of small technical optimisations that have been briefed into the dev team such as:
- Redirecting duplicate versions, fixing redirects on internal links,
There's also work on-page running in the background fixing up keyword cannibalization, consolidating content keyword mapping and ensuring the internal link structure is sound.
Has this happened to anyone else before? If so, how did you recover?
Any suggestions/advice would be really appreciated.
Thank you
-
I have seen things like this happen before, but they're usually associated with a links penalty rather than a rich snippet spam penalty. When Google remove the authority pipelines for bad links, they don't magically decide to start valuing those linking sites again due to a reconsideration request (so in that area, it's common for people to get into an awful mess of unrealistic expectations)
With rich snippet spam penalties, I have seen some pretty savage ones but usually they are more of an on / off scenario. To see the kind of continual decline which you say you are experiencing, is quite unusual
Technical factors can influence ranking results, but they tend to influence indexation more than they influence rankings (e.g: making URLs which were previously hard to discover, easier for Google to discover, so new ranking positions can be created). Technical changes are (usually, there are exceptions) less good at pushing up existing rankings (which is more the domain of content, awesomeness and link-worthiness)
"- Redirecting duplicate versions, fixing redirects on internal links"
Something that can be done with the best of intentions, yet which can often be done wrong. For example, maybe you own a site and you notice that both of these URLs are accessible (200/OK):
One has a trailing slash, the other does not. So you say to yourself, okay what we'll do is redirect one structure to the other! Seems logical right? But what if one of your structures (non-trailling slash) was more commonly linked to than the other (forced trailing slash)? When you make your change, suddenly most of your most important backlinks are hitting 301 redirects, instead of hitting your landing pages directly. In this hypothetical example, if you had picked the alternate structure (removing the trailing slash from URLs instead of forcing it) then the site may have performed much better. This is just a hypothetical illustration, but it shows that - simple ideas are never simple! In SEO we get paid for our analytical skills because they do matter and people need analysis pieces before making sweeping decisions, without realising the potential ramifications
"There's also work on-page running in the background fixing up keyword cannibalization, consolidating content keyword mapping and ensuring the internal link structure is sound"
Again, you may be shooting yourself in the foot in the short term. I am referring to what you term as "consolidating content" which usually revolves in reducing the number of pages on your website and funneling some content together, into fewer, more in-depth URLs which you hope will rank better. Totally the right thing to do in the long term, but in SEO, many strategies which yield long-term gains also cause disruption which causes short-term tail-off. If you JUST pulled yourself out of a penalty, was it really the right time to 'get disruptive'? I'd say no, it was not
If you are consolidating content, Google may or may not rank your single new page as well (for different keywords) as the two or more pages which were funneled into the creation of your new page. Why? Well, from a technical POV, even when you deploy the mighty 301 redirect, it doesn't always transfer 100% SEO authority from the old URL(s) to the new URL
Google tend to run similarity checks over their last active cache of the old URL(s), against the new page which you have supplied. If they seem % dissimilar, then that % of SEO authority is removed from the equity transfer of the 301 redirect. By similar, I mean something akin to, taking all the content from both (old vs new) page variants and running something like a simplified Boolean string similarity test. I don't mean what humans think is similar, I don't mean what you think is similar. I mean - what a mechanical mind would think was similar / dissimilar (often very different)
If Google didn't run such checks, you could easily by up authoritative expired domains, redirect them to yourself and gain loads of SEO authority for nothing. So Google wants to be sure, is THIS content which is receiving this 301 redirect - the SAME content which earned those backlinks? Might the webmaster who linked to that old URL, decide not to link to this new page? If there's much risk of that, even the mighty 301 redirect gets nuked in terms of equity transfer
Your hope of course, is that your new URL will be so much better than the old one(s), that over time it will earn more links than they did. If you are lucky, some authority from the old page(s) will filter through, but you should certainly expect some degree of short-term tail-off. If you have done this just as you have escaped a penalty, I can see how the convergence of your technical disruption(s) and the late penalty, could be causing you significant issues
Instead of doing types of work which remove URLs from your site, remove pages which could be indexing and narrow your content - I'd be doing EXACTLY the opposite. Creating new pages and content which is connected with new (yet relevant) keywords. Maybe work on the top or middle of your keyword (buying) funnel a bit. Get some digital (editorial) PR going, get some more authority and new pages which could be ranking in Google's SERPs. If you think about it, performing purely reductive work after you have had a massive traffic reduction, really isn't going to serve you very well
Hope that 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
-
Google treats pages from main website and sub folder/sub directory differently?
Hi all, We have a sub directory like website.com/help/. This is a differently hosted and served content. So I wonder how Google treats pages from this sub directory. Will the same priority will be given for these pages compared to main website pages? Will there be any ranking difference when same page is from main website or sub directory. I mean like below page. Page from main website: www.website.com/page1/ Page from sub-directory: www.website.com/help/page1/ So which page will have more importance in search results?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Website Traffic Is Down
Hi, My Website www.financeninvestments.com is down for almost now 2 years. I was receiving the good traffic before this but now the traffic is almost down. I want to again do something to get my Traffic back with some consistent efforts. So what efforts should i do to make this back.Pls suggest.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rahulsoni250 -
Is it possible that Google is pulling description from third party websites and displaying in the description section in organic result?
Hi all, I have come across the most weird situation ever in my SEO career. Google is displaying description in organic results for brand term under the website URL that doesnt exist on the website ANYWHERE but this description does appear on some directory sites created back in 2002 or so. Is there a possibility that Google is pulling info from directory sites and displaying as a description in the organic results? I am super confused! Help needed! Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Malika10 -
Organic search traffic improved (besides Google) for last 6 months
Hi, to follow up on my previous post (http://moz.com/community/q/low-on-google-ranking-despite-error-free), I was wandering if someone can tell me whether we are penalised by Google or not? Since the last 6 months, we see a rise in organic visitors coming from Bing, yahoo but Google remains the same. Despite the advice given in previous post, I just feel that something else must be wrong. Perhaps more inbound links with high PR? Socially, we are pretty much engaging 50-60% of our audience, yet no link flow will count for our organic ranking sadly enough... Hopefully someone can have a look at our site www.mercadonline.es in more detail? Ask me in a PM for more info! Thank you Ivordg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ivordg0 -
My site still out of rank
Hello, I am working on a site for past 3 months, here are the problems with this site, 1. It had a forum full of spam becuase initially captcha was not included, 10000 spam backlinks 2. Affiliate page was also hit by spam about 4000 spam backlinks which were either not existing or porn etc.... 3. Too many internal links which were indexed, these additional links were generated due to tags, ids, filters etc. Existing SEO team decided to remove the forum and after 30 days they blocked it in robots. But within 30 days the site moved from 3rd page to no where. Now after few days lator internal links are also cleaned by putting following in the robots, Dissallow: / *? Dissallow: / *id Dissallow: / *tag Links are now cleaning up, all the spam and bad links are now put into disavow file and sent to google via disavow tool. On daily bases good quality links are been produced such as through content, article submission, profile linking, Bookmarks etc. The site is still not any where on top 50 results. The impressions are decreasing, traffic also do not rise as much. How do you see all this situation. What do you suggest and how long do you think it will take to return to top 10 when good linking is being done and all preventive measures are being taken. I would appreciate any feedback on it. Thank you. Site URL: http://www.creativethemes.net keywords: magento themes, magento templates
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MozAddict0 -
Websites with same content
Hi, Both my .co.uk and .ie websites have the exact same content which consists of hundreds of pages, is this going to cause an issue? I have a hreflang on both websites plus google webmaster tools is picking up that both websites are targeting different counties. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Duplicate Content http://www.website.com and http://website.com
I'm getting duplicate content warnings for my site because the same pages are getting crawled twice? Once with http://www.website.com and once with http://website.com. I'm assuming this is a .htaccess problem so I'll post what mine looks like. I think installing WordPress in the root domain changed some of the settings I had before. My main site is primarily in HTML with a blog at http://www.website.com/blog/post-name BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | thirdseo
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress0 -
Sudden drop in ranks and traffic after migrating community website into main domain
Hi, We recently moved our community website (around 50K web pages) to our main domain. It now resides as a sub-domain on our main website. e.g. Before - we had www.mainwebsite.com and www.communitywebsite.com After - we have www.communitywebsite.mainwebsite.com This change took place on July 19th. After a week, we saw 16% drop in organic traffic to mainwebsite.com. Our ranks on most of the head keywords including brand keywords have dropped. We had created 301 redirects from pages on www.communitywebsite.com before this change was made. Has anybody seen this kind of impact when domains are merged? Should we expect that within 3-4 weeks Google will be able to re-index and re-rank all the pages? Is there anything else we could do to rectify the situation? Any feedback/suggestions are welcome!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Amjath0