Identifying why my site has a penalty
-
Hi,
My site has been hit with a google penalty of some sort, but it doesn't coincide with a penguin or panda update. I have attached a graph of my visits that demonstrates this.
I have been working on my SEO since the latter part of last year and have been seeing good results, then all of a sudden my search referrals dropped by 70%.
Can anyone advise on what it could be?
Thanks!
Will
-
Great. Just audit it, fix problems, audit again, write more great content and give it time. Even if you fix the problem (assuming it was an onsite problem) it may take some time for Google to show the love agian.
-
Oh okay! That makes sense. Found a few issues with my php rules that automatically write links on a few of my contents pages.
I've learned some valuable tips here, such a fantastic help. I'm going to get the new site up in a week or two and we'll see if things change.
I'll keep you updated!
-
Ok so. If a bit of content resides at /bikes/mountain-bikes/ and the menulink I use is /bikes/mountain-bikes/ I'll get a status code 200. There is no added delay, no page rank lost, 200 == OK. The menu link points directly to the destination content.
Now lets say you've decided to change the location of that content to /bikes/mountain-bikes/index.html.
You do the 301 redirects on from the old url to the new one, THEN you need to update your links to reflect the new location so you're not just pointing at 301 redirects.
-
Thanks for the table of links. I'll see to it.
I'll work on the code on the new version of the site, seems pointless to do it now.
I've installed the plugin. How do I change the status code of a page? I don't really understand how it can be anything but 200, as if i'm viewing it it's obviously there! I thought 301's pushed the user to the 200 version of the page and only existed temporarily in the browser? Obviously I'm wrong, perhaps you could explain it for me?
Cheers for the screaming frog tool, looks great.
-
Did you change them. The scan I just did doesn't show them.... Maybe your host was getting funky or something lol.
Get this and click the links on your site. You want to link to status code 200, not 301
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/server-status-code-inspec/bmngiaijlojlejaiijgedgejgcdnjnpk
I wouldn't de-index them, I havent found a legitimate reason to de-index anything since 2005, but im a programmer and normally don't need to patch things. You could probably quickly fix them just by adding some content/images.
im going to private msg you another spreadsheet. this should show you source+destination of your 404's and 301's.
btw, the spider im using is Screaming Frog, its the best I've found.
-
Just checked the 418's and they do seem to be already re-directed with 301's, or are actually in place. What would be the protocol here?
-
Got your message, thank you. What tool did you completed the crawl with? I'm sort of disappointed this stuff didn't come up in my seomoz weekly scans.
A few questions;
- How do i know where the 301's are being sent from? So in a this chain of events...
Link on a page on my site > routed via a 301 > landing on the desired page
... how do I find the first step in the process? the table you sent me seems to point out only the middle step.
- Yes the 'about us' and 'contact us' pages are weak. I'm building a new version of the site as we speak and will take care of it then. In the mean time, if i no-index them is that as good as getting rid of them?
I will now sort the 404's and 418's. Without wanting to sound like a broken record; thanks again! Do let me know if there is anything I can do in return once we've got to the bottom of this.
Will
-
private messaged you a google doc of the crawl. Looks like pages that no longer exist, they need 301's.
-
Wow, thanks for all this. It's late now in the UK so I'll check it out tomorrow.
Cheers
p.s. Where are my 418's coming from!?!
-
My crawl finished. You also have a bunch of status 418 "I'm a teapot" status codes. IDK what this is so I looked it up.
Per wikipedia:
418 I'm a teapot (RFC 2324)This code was defined in 1998 as one of the traditional IETF April Fools' jokes, in RFC 2324, Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol, and is not expected to be implemented by actual HTTP servers.
-
-
You'd think so, but 1) we cant fully trust everything Google says and 2) it could have been something that the algorithm progressively finds and penalizes.
Its possible that this is not related to links or content.
Take care of your RCS and make it awesome (real company shtuff)
About us (under construction content, not good)
Contact us (weak and thin, include social
FAQ
Terms and Conditions (404 error on your site!). I once broke all my footer links on a blog that was getting 5k/day and it slammed me down to 600/day nearly instantaneously. Ive seen other sites with 404 errors survive and even Cutts has downplayed the issue of 404 errors, but I believe any 404 can be indicative of a bad user experience. Scan your site for 404s and fix them all.
Also, many of your internal links appear to be pointing to 301 redirects. Update your links to point to the status 200 status code (directly to the destination, not through 301)
In just a quick overview, the above are my notes. This isnt a detailed audit, but you should scan your site for 404 errors and fix them, get your RCS stuff in order and conduct a full site review looking for anything that may be frowned upon by google.
-
Thanks devknob,
In answer to your questions;
-
it is across all organic traffic and all keywords to my entire site
-
the content on my site is fairly squeaky clean. I've been using the seomoz pro-tool to keep it in check. I use yoast seo for wordpress to handle my canonicals and employ no dodgy js hiding techniques. I did not remove content.
-
I haven't been buying links. I do have 20,000+ sitewide links coming from bikingbis.com and 12,000 sitewide links coming from citycyclingedinburgh.info/bbpress/. The ones from bikingbis have been removed and have requested removal of the other. Anchor text is varied and is mainly branded keywords
My question is though, if it's a bad backlink problem, wouldn't it coincide with a panda or penguin update?
Thanks again
Will
-
-
Check your analytics
- Is it a specific group of keywords?
- Is it organic traffic at all?
- Is it traffic to specific page or pages?
Check your website.
- Are your link canonicals setup CORRECTLY?
- Do you have content that is hidden via css/javascript and has no mechanism for unhiding?
- Have you changed alot of links recently and not performed 301 redirects?
- Do you have good content, title tags and meta descriptions?
- Did you remove content
Check your links
- Have you been buying links? Check your backlink profile using opensite explorer. Is there any unusual activity here?
- Is your anchor text varied?
Have you gotten a notice in Google Webmasters tools?
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
-
Active, Old Large site with SEO issues... Fix or Rebuild?
Looking for opinions and guidance here. Would sincerely appreciate help. I started a site long, long ago (1996 to be exact) focused on travel in the US. The site did very well in the search results up until panda as I built it off templates using public databases to fill in the blanks where I didn't have curated content. The site currently indexes around 310,000 pages. I haven't been actively working on the site for years and while user content has kept things somewhat current, I am jumping back into this site as it provides income for my parents (who are retired). My questions is this. Will it be easier to track through all my issues and repair, or rebuild as a new site so I can insure everything is in order with today's SEO? and bonus points for this answer ... how do you handle 301 redirects for thousands of incoming links 😕 Some info to help: CURRENTLY DA is in the low 40s some pages still rank on first page of SERPs (long-tail mainly) urls are dynamic (I have built multiple versions through the years and the last major overhaul was prior to CMS popularity for this size of site) domain is short (4 letters) but not really what I want at this point Lots of original content, but oddly that content has been copied by other sites through the years WHAT I WANT TO DO get into a CMS so that anyone can add/curate content without needing tech knowledge change to a more relevant domain (I have a different vision) remove old, boilerplate content, but keep original
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Millibit1 -
Are businesses still hiring SEO that use strategies that could lead to a Google penalty?
Is anyone worried that businesses know so little about SEO that they are continuing to hire SEO consultants that use strategies that could land the website with a Google penalty? I ask because we did some research with businesses and found the results worrying: blog farms, over optimised anchor text. We will be releasing the data later this week, but wondered if it something for the SEO community to worry about and what can be done about it.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | williamgoodseoagency.com0 -
We lost 60-70% of our organic traffic but no penalty - what happened?
Hi Mozzers! Need some help/advice I’m running a sports betting site – superbetting.com and around 16-19<sup>th</sup> may our organic traffic suddenly dropped with 60-70% or so and ever since we’ve been struggling trying to find the cause and not least, been trying to do something about. A few observations / thoughts; It seems we’ve suddenly have quite a few inbound links from Russia without promoting our content / site towards Russian users. Neither do we have any Russian content. Should we disavow those links and/or try to contact the sites to get our link removed? Looking in ahrefs, I can see that anchors also suddenly are dominated by Russian. Maybe obvious given the above but still strange … We have struggled with spammers trying to deploy link in our forum and have just recently removed them ( or at least we think we have) but could those bad links been hurting us over time? Google ran an algo update in may regarding “quality signals” and I full aware that our site may not be top-notch but I can’t belief that should have hit us that hard since I (and I may be biased :)) would say that there are far lousier sites ranking better than us now than before. Any feedback would be appreciated Thanks! Mike
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | skjorte19740 -
Re-Post: Unanswered - Loss of rankings due to hack. No manual penalty. Please advise.
Sorry for reposting, but i must have accidentally marked this as answered. I am still seeking advice/solutions. I have a client who's site was hacked. The hack added a fake directory to the site, and generated thousands of links to a page that no longer exists. We fixed the hack and the site is fully protected. We disavowed all the malicious/fake links, but the rankings fell off a cliff (they lost top 50 Google rankings for most of their targeted terms). There is no manual penalty set, but it has been 6 weeks and their rankings have not returned. In webmaster tools, their priority #1 "Not found" page is the fake page that no longer exists. Is there anything else we can do? We are out of answers and the rankings haven't even come back at all. Any advise would be helpful. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | digitalimpulse0 -
Partial match penalty & Penguin 2.1 smack
Our site is large and allows business owners to post their inventory for sale. We also make websites for those businesses that post their inventory. We link back to the home page of our site from each of those business websites using our domain name as the anchor text. Last summer we got a partial match penalty from Google "Unnatural links to your site—impacts links Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole. " We investigated and noticed a large amount of links from spammy sites, forum signatures, blog comments, etc. We think we were hit by a negative SEO campaign. We started cleaning up the backlinks and disavowing them. Every reconsideration request since has been denied with more examples of these horrid links. The final reconsideration request gave as examples of how we're violating Google link quality guidelines, our own sites we make for businesses. "_Google has received a reconsideration request from a site owner for domainname.com. We've reviewed the links to your site and we still believe that some of them are outside our quality guidelines." _ So here's the issue I need your advice on. We have tens of thousands of business websites linking back to our main site using our domain name. We're assuming this is the reason Google gave them as examples for violating link quality guidelines. **How can we fix this without losing traffic from removing all those backlinks or make our traffic tank worse than it has? ** Can we replace the domain name with our logo image and still link? Can we nofollow all those links? Can we link not to the home page but to internal pages or sections with no more than 10% of the links, linking to each section? Should we just remove the links and cry?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CFSSEO0 -
Is guest posting good for main link-building tactic for eCommerce site
Hello, Is guest posting going to be devalued? We've been offering a guest post with one link in the body pointing towards one of our articles, and one home page link in the bio. We're looking at doing this as the main link building strategy. Is this still a good idea now and in the future? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Multiple Versions of Mobile Site
Hey Guys, We have recently finished the latest version of our mobile site which means currently we have 2 mobile sites. Depending on what device and Os will depend on which site you will be presented with.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | seekjobs
e.g.
iPhone 3 or 4 users on iOS4 will get version 1 of our mobile site
iPhone 5 users on iOS5 will get the new version (version 2) of our mobile site. Our old mobile site is currently indexed in Google and performing pretty well.
Since the launch of the second mobile site we have not see any major changes to our visibility in Google and so was curious My main concern here is duplicate content so I am curious can Google detect that we have 2 mobile site that we serve depending on device? And if Google can detect this, why has our sites not been penalized! Thanks, LW I know the first thing that comes to your mind is Duplicate content0 -
New Site Structure
Greetings SEOmoz Team and Users, I need some advise, our site has more products to offer so I am try to optimize the index for a general term and each page product for it's own main keyword. Our site offers accommodation such apartments, hotels and vacation rentals so this is my structure: Index: Main Keyword 1 | Keyword 2 | Site name(brand name) Page Product 1: Main Keyword 1 | Keyword 2 | Site name (brand name) Page Product 2: Main Keyword 1 | Keyword 2 | Site name (brand name) Also can I use the brand name at the end of title tag with separate words ? example: londonescape or london escape or londonescape.net London Apartments | short term london apartments | London Escape or London Apartments | short term london apartments | LondonEscape I think ''London Escape'' is better because has more popularity. Looking forward to hear from you. Thanks, Giuseppe
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WorldEscape0