Small business sites banned by google. Please help.
-
Hi.
My 2 sites http://www.painterdublin.com and http://www.tilers-dublin.com were banned by google update in November 2012.
Both were ranking fairly well in search results: painterdublin generating cca 600/month and tilers-dublin cca 300/month organic traffic from google. After update it is about 70% less.
Is there anyone willing to take a look at my pages and give me some advice about what to do to improve the situation?
thank you very much
-
The 27th of September narrows your list of possibilites down to two likely ones. The 27th was a Panda update and the 28th was EMD. Using an EMD domain name is not going to get you penalized, but it's possible that you were previously getting a lot of ranking benefit from having the keyword in your domain and now you have lost that benefit.
Panda affects sites with low quality. Often there are issues with duplicate content (i.e. content that exists on other sites on the web) or thin content.
I would guess Panda is your issue, but I'd need to dig in much further to say so for sure. For example, this article appears on your site and also on http://www.homeinsights.org/house-painting-cost/. Duplication like this can cause Panda to affect you.
-
Hello Marie. thank you very much for your help.
Now looking at my analytics for painterdublin.com exact date of the traffic drop is around 27th of september 2012. (sorry for that November)
No, I didnt receive any message in google webmaster.
I am using EMD domain names painterdublin.com and tilers-dublin.com, I wonder if that is a problem too.
Also content of my landing pages is heavily optimized for those terms (painter dublin, tilers dublin), I wonder if I crossed the "googles line" with it.
What do u think Marie?
thank u very much again
-
Hi CMC. thank you very much for your help. Now I know sites werent banned but penalized, thank u.
Now looking at my analytics for painterdublin.com exact date of the traffic drop is around 27th of september 2012. And I lost traffic from keywords like: painters dublin, painters and decorators dublin, dublin painters etc. which are my most important keywords.
There must be also some problem with my domain name, because I heard google was going after EMD's which "painterdublin.com" certainly is. What do you think?
thank you very much again
-
Hi Tom. thank u very much for your help. No, I didnt receive any message in google webmaster regarding unnatural link building. And yes, I am aware of crosslinking my sites in footers, I will remove those links, I hope it helps.
Also I am wondering if content on my landing pages is ok regarding "keyword density". Do you have an idea about this?
thank you very much again
-
The key to finding out how to improve is to first find out why your sites were affected.
Can you determine the date on which your sites were affected? There was no Penguin update in November. There was a Panda update November 5 and November 21. Panda is about on page quality. If your drop happened immediately after one of those dates then I would look for duplicate content on your site. A quick look shows me that your blog has content that also exists on other sites on the web. Getting rid of that content can help. If that is the issue then you should recover by the next Panda refresh although some sites take a few refreshes to recover.
Or, did you receive a notice in your webmaster tools of a manual warning? If so then that's a whole other issue.
There are many other possibilites. If these were new sites they could have been receiving a honeymoon boost and then been placed lower down on the SERPS. Or, you could have a malware issue or a problem with robots.txt.
But really, if you can tag the date of your drop then that's half the battle.
-
The sites have not been "banned" by Google. "Banned" suggests that they removed the sites from their index. If you search site:painterdublin.com, you'll see that's not the case.
What was the exact date of the traffic drop? Did you lose traffic from particular keywords, or from everything?
-
First, can I ask if you received any message from Google in Webmaster tools? I'm wondering whether you got an unnatural links warning.
At first glance, I think you may have received a Penguin/Over-optimisation penalty. Looking at the anchor text diversity in your link profile (http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?site=www.tilers-dublin.com) and (http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?site=www.painterdublin.com) the vast majority of your links come from anchor text heavy terms, like "painting dublin" and "tilers dublin".
Furthermore, it looks as though the majority of these links are coming from the footer from your group of websites and are site-wide. After the Penguin update, this quickly became a big red flag.
My recommendations would be first to check what message you've received from Google. After that, I would remove all of the footer links on your sites. I think you would be OK replacing these with a single link, on the homepage, to your websites - provided that you mark it as "nofollow".
Once that is done, I would file a reconsideration request. I haven't checked many of your other backlinks, so it might be the case that you would need to remove any other spammy links you can find there.
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
-
Removed Subdomain Sites Still in Google Index
Hey guys, I've got kind of a strange situation going on and I can't seem to find it addressed anywhere. I have a site that at one point had several development sites set up at subdomains. Those sites have since launched on their own domains, but the subdomain sites are still showing up in the Google index. However, if you look at the cached version of pages on these non-existent subdomains, it lists the NEW url, not the dev one in the little blurb that says "This is Google's cached version of www.correcturl.com." Clearly Google recognizes that the content resides at the new location, so how come the old pages are still in the index? Attempting to visit one of them gives a "Server Not Found" error, so they are definitely gone. This is happening to a couple of sites, one that was launched over a year ago so it doesn't appear to be a "wait and see" solution. Any suggestions would be a huge help. Thanks!!
Technical SEO | | SarahLK0 -
Moved a site and changed URL structures: Looking for help with pay
Hi Gents and Ladies Before I get started, here is the website in question. www.moldinspectiontesting.ca. I apologize in advance if I miss any important or necessary details. This might actually seem like several disjointed thoughts. It is very late where I am and I am a very exhausted. No on to this monster of a post. **The background story: ** My programmer and I recently moved the website from a standalone CMS to Wordpress. The owners of the site/company were having major issues with their old SEO/designer at the time. They felt very abused and taken by this person (which I agree they were - financially, emotionally and more). They wanted to wash their hands of the old SEO/designer completely. They sought someone out to do a minor redesign (the old site did look very dated) and transfer all of their copy as affordably as possible. We took the job on. I have my own strengths with SEO but on this one I am a little out of my element. Read on to find out what that is. **Here are some of the issues, what we did and a little more history: ** The old site had a terribly unclean URL structure as most of it was machine written. The owners would make changes to one central location/page and the old CMS would then generate hundreds of service area pages that used long, parameter heavy url's (along with duplicate content). We could not duplicate this URL structure during the transfer and went with a simple, clean structure. Here is an example of how we modified the url's... Old: http://www.moldinspectiontesting.ca/service_area/index.cfm?for=Greater Toronto Area New: http://www.moldinspectiontesting.ca/toronto My programmer took to writing 301 redirects and URL rewrites (.htaccess) for all their service area pages (which tally in the hundreds). As I hinted to above, the site also suffers from a overwhelming amount of duplicate copy which we are very slowly modifying so that it becomes unique. It's also currently suffering from a tremendous amount of keyword cannibalization. This is also a result of the old SEO's work which we had to transfer without fixing first (hosting renewal deadline with the old SEO/designer forced us to get the site up and running in a very very short window). We are currently working on both of these issues now. SERPs have been swinging violently since the transfer and understandably so. Changes have cause and effect. I am bit perplexed though. Pages are indexed one day and ranking very well locally and then apparently de-indexed the next. It might be worth noting that they had some de-index problems in the months prior to meeting us. I suspect this was in large part to the duplicate copy. The ranking pages (on a url basis) are also changing up. We will see a clean url rank and then drop one week and then an unclean version rank and drop off the next (for the same city, same web search). Sometimes they rank along side each other. The terms they want to rank for are very easy to rank on because they are so geographically targeted. The competition is slim in many cases. This time last year, they were having one of the best years in the company's 20+ year history (prior to being de-indexed). **On to the questions: ** **What should we do to reduce the loss in these ranked pages? With the actions we took, can I expect the old unclean url's to drop off over time and the clean url's to pick up the ranks? Where would you start in helping this site? Is there anything obvious we have missed? I planned on starting with new keyword research to diversify what they rank on and then following that up with fresh copy across the board. ** If you are well versed with this type of problem/situation (url changes, index/de-index status, analyzing these things etc), I would love to pick your brain or even bring you on board to work with us (paid).
Technical SEO | | mattylac0 -
Google haveing problems accessing part of my site
hi my site is, www.in2town.co.uk and for a few weeks now google has had trouble accessing part of my site. Today googlewebmaster tools tells me that google is having major problems it shows, 123 pages where access were denied. i have spoken to my hosting company who could not find a problem, so not sure what to do now. can anyone please give me advice on what the problem may be. any help would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Not ranking on Google
Hi all, I am optimising a site which is a hotel directory for a small island in the Mediterranean - Malta. The site is www.maltahotelsonline.com. I did a keyword research and optimised the page. However I am now at link building stage. Since we do not have many links the site is still not ranking very well for the desired keywords (ranking fine on Bing and Yahoo yet not on Google). As a result there isn't much traffic on the site. 1. Is there any particular issue that you can spot on this site that is not allowing it to rank well on Google? 2. Any suggestions on link-building please?
Technical SEO | | ICON_Malta0 -
Canonicalization of index.html - please help
I've read up on the subject but am new at this so I thought I would just put forth a simple question. We want our home page to be referred to as www.domain.com. We want the search engines to find and return this URl in search results. But the page has to have a name and the actual name is NOT to www.domain.com/index.html. This, I believe is what can cause duplicate cotnent issues (not really duplicate but perceived by the serach engines as duplicate content). Is it best to insert http://www.domain.com/" /> in the HEAD section of the index.html page or am I totally misunderstanding this concept?
Technical SEO | | TBKO0 -
Can we use our existing site content on new site?
We added 1000s of pages unique content on our site and soon after google release penguin and we loose our ranking for major keywords and after months of efforts we decided to start a new site. If we use all the existing site content on new domain does google going to penalized the site for duplicate content or it will be treated as unique? Thanks
Technical SEO | | mozfreak0 -
Trying to get google to know my site is a magazine site is this wrong
Hi, i have put a line to describe what my site is at the top of my site and i want to know if this is wrong or not. We have dropped frok being number one in google for lifestyle magazine to now number seven. Before we had to redo our site we were number one and then we dropepd to around number four when we finished the site and now we are number seven and i need to try and get back up there. To help google know we are a lifestyle magazine i have put a line at the top of the site and i want to know if this looks out of place and if i should take it down. i need advice on how to get google to know we are a lifestyle magazine and get back in the top five of google my site is www.in2town.co.uk any help would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
How much of an issue is it if a site is somehow connected to a site that was penalized by Google?
I am working with someone that is about to launch a new site, and one of the sites was affected by the Panda update. Does it matter if the two sites are connected? Share the same hosting provider and same Google Webmaster's account?
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0