Recovering from an Automatic penalty
-
My website dropped from ~15 to 500 + for our main keywords in target markets (but are still doing okay in other countries and for other keywords)
I cleaned my site up and contacted Google who told me no manual spam actions were taken on my site. The only thing I can think is that we suffered from an automatic penalty (the drop corresponded with a small panda update).
If that is in fact what happened, how do we recover?
Also feel free to contribute other ideas about what may have occurred.
-
any kind of time estimate for when we should be re-crawled?
-
In that case, I would say that you should follow eyepaq's advice above. It's pretty much spot on for the problem you have.
-
Penalty date - July 28
Past SEO - usual exact match stuff and a little link buying
Clean up - remove/change links, but internal and external and de-optimize on penalized so keyword is under-optimized and no way could be interpreted as keyword stuffing.
Told Google - sent excel with all the cleanup we did
We are in the gaming industry and it seems like most of our links are coming from affiliates. I told Google this as well since we should not be penalized if our affiliates are doing scammy things.
-
There are still a lot of questions you have to answer before any specific advice can be given. Without answering these questions, it is impossible to say whether you have been penalised for one thing or another (such as an 'algo anchor text penalty').
For example, when exactly did the drop occur? What is the URL of your site? What SEO have you undertaken in the past? What did you do to 'clean up' your site? What else did Google tell you (if anything)?
With this kind of information, it would be easier to pin-point exactly what has happened to your site.
-
Based on your description it looks like an algo anchor text penalty.
That means your main term is overused in on page optimisation and/or used as anchor text way to much.
If this is the case you should start de-optimizing for this term and change or remove any "bad" links that is using this term as anchor text.
First of all you should identify if your link profile is un balanced - that means again, if you have as ratio a lot of in coming links using this term as anchor text.
Is this term also part of your domain name ? You can't really do much about this (the domain thing that is) but at least you can de-optimize teh site so the term is not all over the place.
Google likes to be told what toi rank for and for what term but not in a very loud voice - if you know what I mean.
Once you've cleaned / edited some bad links that used this term as anchor text and you've tunned down a noch the on-page optimisation for the term (internal links/anchors, h1, url format, titles and even content / text within your site) and based on the size of your site (as number of pages vs crawling numbers) you will then have to wait for the site to be re-crawled and you will recover. However you will probably not go back to the initial position (around 15) as some factors that were coming into play for your 15 position will no longer be in place / counting towards your rankings.
As soon as you recover you will need to build a plan for this term in order to improve rankings but don't go again over borad with the optimisation... eg: build good links to the page /that is ranking for this term but without the term as anchor text, channel your internal PR towards this page but again without heavy optimisation around the term.
Hope it helps.
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
-
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 -
Can a move to a new domain (with 301's) shake off a google algorithm penalty
we have done everything under the sun using the holy grail of google guidelines to get our site back onto page 1 for our domain. we have recovered (penguin and panda) algorithm filters for keywords that were page 1 going to page 7 and now page 2. its been 2 years and we cant hit page 1 again. this is our final phase we cna think of.. do you thin kit will work if we move to a new domain. and how much traffic/rankings can we expect to lose in the short-term?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Direct_Ram0 -
Help! Unnatural Linking Partial Manual Penalty
A friend was hit with a manual penalty for unnatural links-impacts links. (see attached) I'm thinking it may be because they copied their entire wordpress.com site over to site.org/blog. (without redirecting it, so they have duplicate content as well) Out of 76+k links, nearly 11,000 are from their wordpress.com blog. If that's the case is the problem solved by upgrading within wordpress.com to redirect to site.org/blog? (then making a reconsideration request?) Or do I risk negatively affecting their site somehow? They saw a significant increase in traffic when they moved the content over but I'm thinking that was more a matter of increasing content on their site than increasing backlinks. The .org site ranks relatively well, whereas the wordpress.com blog doesn't really rank at all.Worth noting: it's a partial match, not a sitewide match. Does that negate my theory about the wordpress.com blog being the cause in any way? Since many of the links from it are sitewide? The wordpress.com blog has a header link to the .org homepage, plus individual links to it in posts. There are also three links in the header to pages on their .com website which redirects to three corresponding pages on the main .org site (the whole .com redirects). There are 23 footer links from the blog to the targeted .org pages as well. In the attached screenshot of who links most from Google Webmaster Tools, note that martindale.com links most, but it's a lawyer's site so they naturally have referring content there. Could that be a problem?Thanks everyone! 🙂M8JVEI6.jpg?1 M6gYE90.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kimmiedawn0 -
Why will Google not remove a manual penalty against us?
Our site was placed under a manual penalty last year in June 2012 after penguin rolled out. We were advised by Google that we had unnatural links pointing to our site. We fought for months, running backlink checks and contacting webmasters where Google's WMT was showing the sites which had links. We have submitted numerous reconsideration requests with proof of our efforts in the form of huge well labeled spreadsheets, emails, and screen shots of online forms requesting link removal.When the disavow tool came out we thought it was a godsend and added all the sites who had either ignored us or refused to take down the links to the disavow.txt with the domain: tag. Then we submitted another reconsideration request, but to no avail.We have since had email correspondence with a member of the Google Quality Search Team who after reviewing the evidence of all our previous reconsideration requests and disavow.txt still advised us to make a genuine effort and listed sites which had inorganic links pointing to our site which were already included in the disavow.txt.Google has stated "In order for your site to have a successful reconsideration request, we will need to see a substantial, good-faith effort to remove the links, and this effort should result in a significant decrease in the number of bad links that we see."We have truly done everything we can and proven it too! Especially with all the sites in the disavow.txt there must be a decrease in links pointing to our site. What more can we do? Please help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Benbug0 -
How to tackle google penguin algorithmic penalty?
My Website ranking went down mid of april, I sent a Reconsideration request and the reply was : “ We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. If you've experienced a change in ranking which you suspect may be more than a simple algorithm change, there are other things you may want to investigate as possible causes, such as a major change to your site's content, content management system, or server architecture.” My site was classic asp and i change that to a new word press theme I change the site structure and created new fresh content on the entire site focusing on user experience. But still no positive result in the ranking. I further did a test and created 3 new landing pages that target long tail keywords with low competition. Once these pages got indexed the start appearing on first page for couple of days and then gradually the started to go down in ranking now they are not in the top 10 pages. Now someone told me to buy a new domain and start fresh before i follow this route I would like to if anyone could help me should i buy a new domain and start fresh or should i wait till i start getting my ranking back My link profile according to open site explorer is 190 links from 74 domains and domain authority is 31. Can anyone help please
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | conversiontactics0 -
Using the right Schema.org - & is there a penalty in using the wrong one?
Hi We have a set of reviewed products (in this case restaurants) that total an average rating of 4.0/5.0 from 800 odd reviews. We know to use schema/restaurant for individual restaurants we promote but what about for a list of cities, say restaurants in boston for example. For the product page containing all of Boston restaurants - should we use schema.org/restaurant (but its not 1 physical restaurant) or schema.org - product + agg review score? What do you do for your product listing pages? If we get it wrong, is there a penalty? Or this just simply up to us?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | xoffie1 -
Need some urgent Panda advice. Open discussion about recovering from the Panda algorithm.
I have a site that has been affected by Panda, and I think I have finally found the problem. When I created this site in the year 2006, I bought content without checking it. Recently, when I went through the site I found out that this content had many duplicates around the web. Not 100% exact, but close to. The first thing I did is ask my best writer to rewrite these topics, as they are a must on my site. This is a very experienced writer, and she will make the categories and subpages outstanding. Second thing I did was putting a NOINDEX, FOLLOW robots meta in place for the pages I determined being bad. They haven't been de-indexed yet. Another thing I recently did is separate other languages and move these over to other domains (with 301's redirecting the old locations to the new.) This means that the site now has a /en/ directory in the URL which is no longer used. With this in mind I was thinking to relocate the NEW content, and 301 the old (to preserve the juice for a while.) For example: http://www.mysite.com/en/this-is-a-pandalized-page/ 301 to http://www.mysite.com/this-is-the-rewritten-page/ The benefits of doing this are: decreasing the amounts of directories in the URL getting rid of pages that are possibly causing trouble getting fresh pages added to the site Now, the advice I am looking for is basically this: Do you agree with the above? Or don't you agree? If you don't, please be so kind to include a reason with your answer. If you do, and have any additional information, or would like to discuss, please go ahead 🙂 Thanks, Giorgio PS: Is it proven that Panda is now a running update? Or is it still periodically executed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VisualSense1