Google Penguin Penalty
-
Howdy Guys,
We have been battling our way the Google penguin penalty and have just received our 3 knocked back reconsideration request.I posted a find on here the other day about a simple change of page title made our site jump back up...
In the meantime I've built 1 hight quality link back to our site and we have moved again from #50 to #46.Have Google ever removed a penalty without telling you?Should we ask for another reconsideration request?Thanks,
Scott -
Sry guys - must have posted while others were writing. Even if you didn't get the original email - if Google is saying you have unnatural links, then you need to deal with that problem. Submitting recon makes no difference if you dont get rid of the bad links
You will almost certainly need to take action by linkmining your website, identifying 'unnatural' links or links from blatantly bad neighborhoods, submit requests for removal from the webmasters, and so on. Document all of your work and then add that information in with your reconsideration request. If you do not put the work in you will not get a positive response.
-
Hi Scott -
Eyepaq has it right in that you need to understand if you are under a manual penalty or an algorithmic penalty to know exactly what course of action to take.
Manual Penalty - You'll get an email in WMT if you are under penalty, This will be due to bad links. You will need to clean up your links, and then open that email and click on the 'reconsideration request' link.
Algorithmic - You'll usually see a sudden drop in positioning, in some cases it will affect a string of your best keyword variations while other low lying fruit as it were still rank well. For this penalty, check anchor text % first, then go through the other penguin stuff (you can find tons of info in the SEOMoz blog). There is a form online you can use if you "feel your website was unfairly demoted" but I am no longer sure of its efficacy.
Position 46 > 50 or vice versa. This really means nothing at all so don't take it as an indicator. Google is always messing around so 4 positions out of 50 is insignificant. For example, your site used to be top 10, but when it moved to 50, about 40 websites moved "up" a spot. Consistent movement from week to week is a better indicator.
-
By "knocked back" - I mean we have submitted a reconsideration request and they have said we still have unnatural links...
** But then this is not penguin - it's something different - even if is still related with links.
As far as I know there is a policy now and they are sending out notification via WMT for this type of filters. For you not getting one it either means it was applied a long time ago when they didn't send out all notifications for all filters applied or you've skiped the message somehow
Or it's not a manual action - it's algo based.
Questions:
-
did you manage to identify bad links pointing to your site ? If so, are those "bad" links pointing to home page or deep, to inner pages ? (important as far as solution to deal with those)
-
did you include in the reconsideration request you've sent out so far the action taked in order to cut those bad links out ? Did you actually do something to remove any of those links or cut those links out by 404-ing the target page (if home page was not the target).
Again, your issue is not Penguin related but the bellow resource might also help:
http://www.webpronews.com/google-penguin-update-reconsideration-request-tips-from-google-2012-04
-
-
I think if you look hard enough you will find bad links to every site, as you never got an original message i would assume its an algorithmic penalty.
And yes by changing page content and varying your anchor text on new links can make a big difference, Google are clever in a way they word their messages and you will never know if its manual action taken unless they specifically say so.
-
Hi Eyepaq,
Thanks for the reply.
By "knocked back" - I mean we have submitted a reconsideration request and they have said we still have unnatural links...
1 thing I remember is that we never received a message with WMT we actually filed for a reconsideration request and then recieved a message back saying we had bad links, could this be slightly different?
Thanks,
Scott
-
Hi,
If you are 100% sure it's Penguin related then the reconsideration request won't help as Penguin is not a manual action.
There is a form online that you can use posted by Matt Cutts - did you mean that as "sending a reconsideration request".
if not, the answer was you are still violating the rules or that you don't have any manual action against your site ?
What do you mean by "knocked back" ?
Have Google ever removed a penalty without telling you?
** Yes - all the time. Algorithmic penalties are applied and lifted with no message sent.
Lately manual actions (penalties) are noted in your WMT account but even those (manual actions) expire after a time - if you didn't fix it those will be reapplied but the lift off won't be sent as a notice.
Should we ask for another reconsideration request?
** Don't play with those. It matters what kind of response you've received after the first 3.
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 overriding meta description - retrospective?
Hi all, we run a furniture store and our results in Google.co.uk almost always use the page's content as the description in the search results, even though we have a correctly implemented meta description tag. The rival's pages that rank above and below us almost always show the ranking page's meta description in Google's results page. Our developer seems to think it's because we added the meta description tags long after the pages were first indexed by Google and he seems to think Google has "fixed" on the page content and is happy with that over our meta description ...but I've never heard of that before. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bee1590 -
DMCA Complaint to Google - HELP
I have several sites copying my content, which I found out via Copyscape.com. Unfortunately, this is giving me duplicate content. I filed a DMCA complaint through Google and the infringing pages were approved but the pages still remain. Can someone please help me understand this better? I thought Google was supposed to remove these pages? Am I supposed to content the site owner to get the content removed or are their pages simply de-indexed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tutugirl0 -
Google+ Pages on Google SERP
Do you think that a Google+ Page (not profile) could appear on the Google SERP as a Rich Snippet Author? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | overalia0 -
Google local listing
I have a site and i registerd for local listing in google but i have not received any letter from google.It is second time i request for pin one month back and this time also did not received letter from google. what should i do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alick3000 -
How to Block Google Preview?
Hi, Our site is very good for Javascript-On users, however many pages are loaded via AJAX and are inaccessible with JS-off. I'm looking to make this content available with JS-off so Search Engines can access them, however we don't have the Dev time to make them 'pretty' for JS-off users. The idea is to make them accessible with JS-off, but when requested by a user with JS-on the user is forwarded to the 'pretty' AJAX version. The content (text, images, links, videos etc) is exactly the same but it's an enormous amount of effort to make the JS-off version 'pretty' and I can't justify the development time to do this. The problem is that Googlebot will index this page and show a preview of the ugly JS-off page in the preview on their results - which isn't good for the brand. Is there a way or meta code that can be used to stop the preview but still have it cached? My current options are to use the meta noarchive or "Cache-Control" content="no-cache" to ask Google to stop caching the page completely, but wanted to know if there was a better way of doing this? Any ideas guys and girls? Thanks FashionLux
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FashionLux0 -
Custom Attributes in Google Places
Hi Guys I'm looking for some clarity of what I can and can't add to the custom attribute fields in a Google Places listing. From my understanding, you can add additional information about your services, but not what those services are. The issue I'm trying to resolve is that a client of mine offers far more than the 5 services/ category options Places allow. They are a home services company, covering all sorts from plumbing, painting and decorating, through to extensions etc. They have about 25 different services. At the moment I'm restricted to just getting rankings for 5 services (correlated to the categories in Places), when I'd like to rank locally for them all. As Google is showing local results for most search queries related to their services whether those searches are geographically modified or not, I'm in a position where even if I am ranking top 5 organically for the terms, I'm still on bottom of page 1, or top of page 2. Would it be wise to add these additional services to the custom attributes section of the Places listing, or would this set off the potential for a listing suspension? Any ideas how to combat this problem would be very welcome.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PerchDigital0 -
Have we suffered a Google penalty?
Hello, In January, we started a new blog to supplement our core ecommerce website. The URL of the website is www.footballshirtblog.co.uk and the idea behind it was that we would write articles related to our industry to build a community which would ultimately boost our sales. We would add several posts per day, a mix between shorter news stories of around 150 words and more detailed content pages of around 500 words. Everything was going well, we were making slow but sure progress on the main generic keywords but were receiving several thousand visitors a day, mostly finding the posts themselves on Google. The surge on traffic meant we needed to move server, which we did around 6 weeks ago. When we did this, we had a few teething problems with file permissions, etc, which meant we were tempoarily able to add new posts. As our developers were tied up with other issues, this continued for a 7-10 day period, with no new content being added. In this period, the site completely dropped from Google, losing all it's rankings and traffic, to the extent it now doesn't even rank for it's own name. This is very frustrating as we have put a huge amount of work and content into developing this site. We have added a few posts since, but not a huge amount as it is frustrating to do it with no return and the concern that the site has been banned forever. I cannot think of any logical reason why this penalty has occured as we haven't been link spamming, etc. Does anyone have any feedback or suggestions as to how we can get back on track? Regards,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ukss1984
David0 -
What are the different tactics for getting ranked/ included in Google finance searches such as http://www.google.com/finance/company_news?q=NASDAQ:ADBE
I don't know what ranking factors they are using for this feed. The results vary greatly from a search done at google.com or google.com/news and google.com/finance I'm working with a website that regularly publishes finance-related news and currently gets traffic from google finance. I'm wondering what we can do to optimize our news articles to possibly show more prominently or more often. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joemascaro0