Is There Such Thing as Minor Penalties or Restrictions?
-
Hello Mozzers
So generally its said that when a site receives a penalty from Google - it's obvious - you can't miss it...
But does google apply minor penalties (say dropping 5-10 places for one not so great link)
One particular campaign we've been working pretty hard - really great stuff - all white hat techniques - but there were a couple of links I wasn't 100% sure on - but got them any way as I guessed that the effect of them, if not positive, would be neutral at worse... (The sites wen't obvious spam sites but just seemed 'not great')
Recently after, we dropped around 8 place for our main keyword ranking. It's not a very competitive space. Is this likely just standard inexplicable fluctuation, or is there such thing as minor penalties or restrictions?
Cheeers
-
Hi Radi,
It's hard to say, but with the new penguin update, there is a chance that certain parts or pages of your site might have been affected by the new penguin as a result of spam signals, but there is still a lot of uncertainty.
Here is what Google said: "Penguin now devalues spam by adjusting ranking based on spam signals, rather than affecting ranking of the whole site."
They said "adjusting ranking" as opposed to penalisation, which looks like your situation.
More about it here: https://mza.seotoolninja.com/blog/penguin-4-was-it-worth-the-wait
I hope this helps!
Thanks,
-
Hey Radi,
Historically there used to be 'Site-wide' and 'Partial' penalties for link spamming.
SEOValley covered this pretty well here - http://www.seovalley.com/blog/googles-manual-penalty-site-wide-matches-vs-partial-matches.html
If you've been hit with either one of these, it should appear in Google Search Console.
What you're referring to might be a more small-scale fluctuation that might indeed be based on a couple of the links that you weren't so sure on. Check the competitive landscape of the page and, if other sites haven't been improving their SEO substantially, consider evaluating those links you've acquired and remove them if you're not 100% sure.
Cheers,
Sean
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
-
Penalty because of logo banner in sidebar of external website?
Dear mozzers, One of our pages is not ranking (well). I wrote another question about this here on Moz. I just discovered that there is an external website that has a banner to our page in the sidebar. The banner is on every 134+ pages of that site. It is in a banner slider and only show for a few seconds every now and then. The link is not "nofollow". It seems that our page dropped from Google slightly after this banner was added. However I am completely sure about this. The link is over here in the banner carousel/slider in the sidebar: http://www.wierszowisko.com/ My questions are: Could this banner log cause a penalty for our page? If so what can we do to undo this? Ask the webmaster to remove the link? Disavow on Google? How does this exactly work?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | rdudkiewicz1 -
Strategies to recover from a Google Penalty?
2 years ago we took over a client who had a hacked site and also had signed up with a black hat SEO team that set up 50 spammy directory links back to the site. Since then we have cleaned up the hacks, had the site reviewed by Google and readded to the Search Index, and disavowed all the directory links through GWT. Over the last 2 years, we've encouraged the client to create new content and have developed a small but engaged social following. The website is www.fishtalesoutfitting.com/. The site's domain authority is 30, but it struggles to rank higher than 20 for even uncompetitive long tail keywords. Other sites with much lower domain authorities outrank the site for our primary keywords. We are now overhauling the site design and content. We are considering creating an entirely new URL for the primary domain. We would then use 301 redirects from the old url to the new. We'd welcome insight into why the current site may still be getting penalized, as well as thoughts on our strategy or other recommendations to recover from the events of 2 years ago. Thank you.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mlwilmore0 -
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 -
Our ranking as not returned after penalty, Why?
Hi, We have had a Google action against us for over a year. After many "SEO Company's" we found someone who help us remove (December 2013) the action. Which was due to our bad back link profile. We have 100% improved our content for our website, as Google has requested. We are active within social media, we add relevant content to our blog and we clean up our desk after we finish work 🙂 After looking at Moz tools we have great results, sometimes even better than our competitors. But we are still not getting or improving on our traffic, if anything its decreasing. Is anyone else in the same position? or has anyone recovered from a similar situation? Josh
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JoshuaKersh0 -
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 -
Non Manual penalties, should I trash my site?
My URL is: www.adserve.com.au I get no traffic from google and I am convinced that I have penalties from the links that point to my page. I have written to google previously and they told me that there are no manual penalties on the site. I give up... I am shelving my ENTIRE brand and starting again with a new site, http://www.trusignage.com, I do not want to do this but... If I do a search for
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AdAdam
"Using and implementing the AdServe digital menu board system couldn’t be easier! Just get any screen installed by a tradesman or electrician, plug the digital menu board device" two pages from within my site come up but my homepage does not, it comes up when you click on "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 2 already displayed" A search for
"The AdServe system comprises of only one tiny component that can plug directly into the HDMI port of a screen. Traditional digital signage systems require drilling into walls, running cables, a bunch of valuable space and the installation of several pieces of costly"
Brings up another 2 pages from my site, when clicking on "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 2 already displayed."
My homepage does not even come up... but the homepage of my new site http://www.trusignage.com comes up. My new site is at http://www.trusignage.com there is only 2 pages of duplicate content, the about us and the buy now page.
Is google going to penalise my new site? I WILL NOT DO ANY SEO, only on page......... I wont hire any SEO firm at all. My old site has a few great links to it
http://www.sixteen-nine.net/2013/06/24/android-digital-signage-closer-adserve/
http://www.crunchbase.com/company/adserve-digital-signage
I also have many of my REAL youtube videos that link to my site, maybe about 15
If I 301 redirect my penalised site to my new one am I just poisoning my new site as well? I could get the links changed instead. I will have to keep my old site www.adserve.com.au as I have customers who go to that site to lookup my contact details for support etc. will google see the same phone number and address etc and think I am trying to fill google up with duplicate websites? I would really prefer to keep www.adserve.com.au for Australian clients and usewww.trusignage.com for international clients, if the site layout is the same but all of the site passes copyscape then will I get hurt by duplicate content?
Google is ruining me.. I have no money to spend on adwords right now. I have a new highly inovative software product that has taken almost 2 years to develop and I think I deserve more than 4 visits per month. My actual business has been around for 7 years.
I invented SaaS digital signage in 2007 http://youtu.be/-YpyjLALoBU find me some web based digital signage system that was around prior to 2010?
This is me and my product http://youtu.be/ClXSiIA5DRY
Why should my site be treated as trash by google? I have in the past employed a SEO firm and if I search for "If you are looking for the top provider of digital signage in Australia, visit today" I find 70 absolute crap links to my site. I have disvowed them, there must be more links somewhere but I have no money or time to chase down site owners to remove them when I do not even know if I can get them all and have no guarantee that this will even help.. So bottom line, do I need to junk my www.adserve.com.au site? There is no getting away from what some SEO company has spammed in the past?
And again, using a tool to hunt down these spam links and try to get them removed will tie up my own time that needs to be spent on developing my software and I have no cash to pay people to do this for me. [edited by staff because line breaks weren't showing]0 -
Penguin 2.1 Penalty- Can't Understand why hit by it?
Hi, I have lost all my rankings after Penguin 2.1 update. I haven't did anything wrong. Want to know the root cause of the penalty so that I can overcome this. Any help would be appreciated. Website: http://tiny.cc/hfom4w
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | chandman0 -
Confusing penalties
Dear Mozzers, I've been working on a friend's website that is fighting for pretty competitive keywords (+90,000 gms) and has been relying almost exclusively on $1800/mo of comment spam to rank on the first page. Now that I've taken over SEO my first priorities were to: eliminate duplicate content improve site structure optimize internal links build legitimate do-follows add some keyword density fix titles and H tags Essentially just the basics, right? But since cancelling the comment spam, rankings for their primary keyword have consistently dropped over the last 3 months. I'm using the same strategies that I've used successfully on at least 6 similar websites. At the moment their homepage is still almost entirely duplicate content -- which is obviously a huge problem, but it seems a little odd that they could have been held up exclusively by that comment spam for so long, doesn't it? Even stranger, their authority and trust scores are now higher than any of the competition. Needless to say, my friends are getting pretty antsy and I'm starting to second guess myself. Do you think I should continue to push them to improve content, eliminate penalties, and build legitimate links -- or should I give in and suggest buying links as a short term solution? Advice is really appreciated!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | brevityworks0