Unable to find why my site was penalized since 24th April
-
I'm into the 1 month free trail of pro membership for my niche site http://www.creditcardpaymentgateways.in. The traffic dropped from around 250 to 50 on April, 24th but as of now it has recovered some to 100. This site has original content and not a spammy site.
Out of all the metrics I see in my PRO Dashboard I'm not at all able to figure out the reason of being penalized.
After this penalty I've worked on to reduced the "payment gateway" keyword density from 7-9% to below 5%. Today I notice some rankings upgrade.
Overall Seomoz pro membership is useful for very large sites who have dedicated teams to monitor SEO but for me I'm trying to figure out what to do with all those stats.
-
Adam thanks for reply. I've a dozen sites. But site is the best I've and I'm not cribbing about traffic drop for my other sites during this Penguin update. I did buy cheap links for $10-20 but I did for some other sites too. Later I quit doing all that SEO since I understood that doing such activity is of no use. That was around 10-12 months back. I don't think backlinks are such a serious concern which will entail a penalty here.
I don't do SEO anymore as I don't have time for my dozen sites. Seomoz is not correctly showing on page optimization like keyword optimization. It is showing many errors in crawl diagnostics. But those are from the PHPBB forum and every PHPBB webmaster would get it which is ignorable but Seomoz is highlighting it in Red. At the same time I've another Mybb forum and is also getting similar errors here but it's traffic has been increasing during past two months.
On-page got a D for home page. Overall there is no serious issue I could see here.
There is one silly critical report I see. Page title is: "Choose Your Payment Gateway in 9 Easy Steps" and On-Page Keyword Usage for: payment gateway india
I see that "payment gateway" indeed is there in title and India should be assumed from TLD .in of website - what's the point of calling it a critical factor!
-
There are certainly quite a few issues with the SEO of your site and many areas where you could look to improve.
Firstly, you mention that your site has been penalized. Why do you think your site has been penalized? I am not suggesting that your site has or has not been penalized but many people's first reaction is that their site has been penalized when in fact they have just suffered a drop in rankings. Having looked at your site, there are some issues that might have caused a penalty but I couldn't say for sure without more info.
So, have you been tracking your rankings within the PRO Dashboard? Have you noticed considerable drops in rankings for your main keywords? If so then this could indicate a penalty.
Have you setup Google Webmaster Tools? If so then have you received any messages from Google regarding a penalty or other issues? This will give you a clearer picture as to whether you have been penalized and why.
Having looked at your backlink profile, I can see several issues that could potentially have caused some problems. Firstly, your anchors have been massively over optimized with commercial terms. This was a massive factor in the recent Penguin update which Ryan has kindly given you a link to. You also seem to have a lot of spammy links from fairly obvious link farms which could also be causing you problems.
Finally, your on-page optimization could be significantly improved, I won't list all the issues here.
Anyway, I hope that's given you a few ideas to get started on.
Adam.
-
Hi Anurag,
Without spending some time examining your website we cannot determine the cause of your penalty; however, April 24th is the date Google rolled out the Penguin update. Many sites who purchased links (paid SEO companies to "build" links, submitted to hundreds of free directories, submitted to many article directories, spammed comments/forums with links, etc) were penalized.
You can read about Penguin here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/04/another-step-to-reward-high-quality.html
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
-
Sitemap submission for site migration?
Hi mozzers, We're about to migrate 4 domains into 1. Is there a particular way I should generate and submit the sitemap or should I just follow the same protocol as for one domain? Should I even worry submitting a sitemap when the site has this drupal module? I have access to the webmaster tools of all domains, should I do something specific on the accounts that are migrating besides submitting a sitemap? Thanks for letting me know!
Technical SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Making a site mobile friendly
Hey Mozzers, Im having a go at making our site mobile friendly without enlisting the help of developers and incorporating additional costs. I am ok with most of it as its just CSS work bar the odd occasion when i need to reposition some elements within the code. However, i have found myself wanting to use display:none {} on many elements that are just not practical on a mobile site. Some pages may have to hide substantial content. Would this be considered an issue or will google just see it as me hiding impractical elements for a different sized screen. I have googled this question for the past hour and there is a whole bunch of conflicting advice. As always, Many thanks
Technical SEO | | ATP0 -
Should we dump the https from a client site?
We inherited a site that has both http and https. No e-commerce or data transfer...just html. Should we dump the https certificate? I think it might be causing issues with indexing and possible duplicate content. The https site has a certificate warning message...not good. The URL is www.charlottemechanical.com
Technical SEO | | theideapeople0 -
Seomoz Can not Crawl My Site
Hello there Seomoz can not crawl my site. It's been 3 days now not a single page has been crawled. I deleted the campaign and tried again still now crawl not a single page.. Any solutions??
Technical SEO | | ExpertSolutions0 -
Is there a pinging tool to ping all sites at once
hi, i am just wondering if there is a tool that you can put on your toolbar that allows you to ping all the sites at once. The last thing i want to keep doing is to go through every single one and ping my article. I would like to find a tool that does it all for me, can anyone let me know if there is one out there. many thanks
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Site command
How reliable is site command? Is there any other way to check indexed pages.
Technical SEO | | gmk15670 -
How do you find bad links to your site?
My website has around 900 incoming links and I have a Google 50 penalty that is sitewide. I have been doing research and from what I can see is that the 50 penalty is usually associated with scetchy links. The penalty started last year. I had about 40 related domains to my main site and each had a simple one page site with a link to the main site. (I know I screwed up) I cleaned up all of those links by removing them. The single page site still exist, but they have no links and several of them still rank very well. I also had an outside SEO person that bought a few links. I came clean with Google and told them everything. I gave them all of my sites and that the SEO person had bought links. I gave them full disclosure and removed everything. I have one site that I can't get the link removed from. I have contacted them numerous times to remove the link and I get no response. I am curious if anyone has had a simular experience and how they corrected the situation. Another issue is that my site is "thin" because its an ecommerce affiliate site and full of affiliate links. I work in the costume market. I'm also afraid that I have other bad links pointing to my site. Dooes anyone know of a tool to identify bad links that Google may be penalizing me for at this time. Here is Google's latest denial of my reconsideration request. Dear site owner or webmaster of XXXXXXXXX.com. We received a request from a site owner to reconsider XXXXXXXX.com for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines. We've reviewed your site and we believe that some or all of your pages still violate our quality guidelines. In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from XXXXXXXXXX.com may not appear or may not rank as highly in Google's search results, or may otherwise be considered to be less trustworthy than sites which follow the quality guidelines. If you wish to be reconsidered again, please correct or remove all pages that are outside our quality guidelines. When such changes have been made, please visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?hl=en and resubmit your site for reconsideration. If you have additional questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support. Sincerely, Google Search Quality
Technical SEO | | tadden0 -
I have a penalized site and don't know what the cause is
I have a site which appears to have a Google indexation penalty. According to Google because its violating the T/Cs. Here are some background details about the site: The site is a online poker + deposit methods related site on a .co.uk TLD. It has 30+ uniquely written pages, and no advertising at the moment. In June of 2010, June 10 to be precisely, I bought this site from a fellow webmaster/affiliate. After the site 's ownership changed I tried accessing the server, but I couldn't log into it . I noticed that this host had serious problems and the IP was unreachable. After trying for some time the previous owner got me all the content in Word files and I created a new hosting account and re-launched the site on June 28. Between a couple of days after June 10 and June 28, the site was unreachable, and completely de-indexed from Google. When I re-launched the site, I used the default Wordpress Template Twenty Ten, and created new pages with the Word files I received from the previous owner. I waited a bit, but noticed the site didn't get re-indexed. So on August 18th I moved the content of domain xxx.com to yyy.co.uk/xxx/ and 301-ed all the former locations, hoping that this might help yyy.co.uk get indexed..... but nothing. On October 28 of 2010 I submitted my first reconsideration request, which was processed on November 17th without any change. At that time Google didn't say if anything was wrong like now, so I just waited... and waited... and waited some more. At some point I was ready to let this one go, as I didn't/don't see any problems with it. In fact, it used to be indexed before. By now, I removed all links pointing to it that I had control off, and there are hardly any left over. The site as well doesn't have any outgoing links left, so that can't be it either. I also removed a kind-a duplicate keyword heavy menu from the sidebar, as well as the widgets from the footer. Finally I also fixed a problem caused by Yoast Wordpress SEO Plugin, but I only installed this plugin recently, so that could not be the problem that caused the penalty. So after another reconsideration request Google again let me know this site still has issues, but I really have no clue which, or how to find out. I don't feel like doing any work on this site, as there is no guarantee that it will ever lose its penalty. What should I do now?
Technical SEO | | VisualSense0