Which SEO companies offer Penalty analysis?
-
I'm having a hard time finding a (good) SEO company which specializes itself in Penalty analysis? Any recommendations?
I only found Bruce Clay, but they charge 8,000$ :)...
-
Keep an eye on the cached version of the page - once it is updated you may see something straight away but I would tend to give it a couple of weeks after the page is crawled.
-
That seems like a good plan. In which timeframe should I expect results (if any)?
-
Hard to say but it smells like algorithmic filtering of sorts - they were picked up for some reason and are now downgraded.
My approach would be to do an experiment, pick one page, totally rewrite it, track it's progress against the other pages.
Always try to apply scientific rigour, change one variable, measure the results, use that information to steer further decisions or inspire further tests and experiments.
-
When I copied & pasted chunks of text in Google & Bing, I did notice that Google showed way more results then Bing. This could also indicate that Google is more tolerant to duplicate content in their index then Bing.
The links you checked were totally removed from the index on Bing a few weeks ago. They are now back in the index, but not (yet) in the top 50. What does that indicate?
-
Hey, not to say there are not other issues, but that is an obvious line of investigation and worth pursuing if only to tick it off the list - a real audit would dig a lot deeper!
As Dr. Marie said, it's an odd one to be Bing specific - that's what piqued my interest!
Good luck!
Marcus -
Hi Marie,
Thank you for the tip. I will definitely check if there aren't too many keywords on the page.
In the theory of Marcus, it could make sense that Google recognizes the original content, while Bing does not recognize us as the original content. Google places us on top, while Bing places us below. This indicates that Bing is using different metrics which are not in my benefit.
I also checked Bing WMT, but no messages.
-
This is an interesting question given that your ranking drop is happening in Bing and not Google. I think this is the first time I have ever heard anyone with that issue.
I don't have the answer for you, but I have one quick thought. Duane Foresster, head of Bing, mentioned a while back that they use keyword stuffing in the meta keywords tag as an indicator of spam. If you've got meta keywords tags in place I would remove them. It probably won't make a huge difference, but it can't hurt.
Also, have you checked your Bing WMT? There may be some clues in there as to what is going on.
-
Okay, quick look at three pages that have dropped from Bing.
If I take a chunk of text from the homepage and google it in double quotes I often find 50 or more pages with the same content. Not a good start but at least your page comes up first indicating that you are at least the owner / originator of the content.
If we do the same in Bing, I am finding your pages, but only after several others with the same content AND bing ranks other sites above your site indicating a problem.
What to do? Well, it depends. How did this content get onto all these other sites? Has it been pinched from your site? If so, you need a content audit and to find any other sites using your content and to ask them to take it down.
You could try some DMCA takedown requests but often, if this is an old site and you have been wildscale plundered I have found rewriting the content is often easier on your site.
As an example, I have a client I have worked with for 10 years or more. We set them up and they have been pretty much ruling the roost in their little niche for years and were the first site to really set up doing what they do we believe.
Well, long before panda or penguin they suddenly dropped out of search and I had a panicked phone call. A bit of digging found literally hundreds of sites all over the world that had copied content, also, some pretty much out and copies of the website (with not all links replaced as well so still pointing to some pages on the source site).
We tried to contact all these folks but in the end just used it as an excuse to freshen up the content and do a rewrite and it bounced back.
Now, not saying you don't have other problems, it was the quickest of quick looks but certainly, this is the direction I would go in.
Hope that helps!
Marcus -
HI Marcus,
No, the pages are 2 to 6 years old.
I will send you a PM with the link now.
Thank you.
-
Hmm, interesting, so are these new pages that rank well and then drop out of search? Again, near impossible to provide any more feedback without a link but feel free to fire me a PM or email and I will feedback here (keeping your anonymity intact)
-
Thank you Tom and Marcus, for your responses. It was really helpful. I value it highly.
Just to be clear, the penalty is on page-level and only on Bing. Weekly I see 1 or 2 pages from my website removed from the index on Bing (page 1 or 2 ranking before). I use the weekly ranking report of Seomoz as an indicator. This has been happening since January. When I go to Bing I indeed can't find the pages that lost the ranking according to Seomoz. They seem totally removed from the search index. Also no messages in Bing Webmaster tools.
I have no idea what is triggering this page-level penalty. So I'm looking for an expert on this matter.
I prefer not to share my website openly.
-
Hey
We specialise in SEO Audits which can cover a range or problems (including penalty analysis) but it can also be something that you can do on your own. Certainly, there is a lot of moving parts and it depends on the complexity of the site, the history and a number of other variables.
So, for starters, can you provide a URL for some feedback? Additionally, can you provide any other details?
- History
- Platform (CMS : WordPress, Magento etc)
- Problems including dates and any additional information
As a starting point that should enable you to get some feedback from the community and the problem may be quite apparent and tied to known dates with algorithm updates.
First up take a look at your analytics and then compare any obvious drops to this:
http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-changeThen, if you find a date that tallies up, take a look at your traffic for two weesk before and after the drop. Check out search terms, landing pages and anything else important to see what was most effected and build a list of terms and pages to start your further analysis.
Then, with http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ you can examine these individual pages and anchor text terms and look for obvious patterns and problems with external elements.
If, it is more of a panda type penalty then you can use services like copyscape to get an idea of what is going on from a duplicate content perspective.
Ultimately, there are so many permutations and possibilities that without a URL and some more info it's near impossible for anyone to give you any more targeted feedback.
Certainly though, if you would like someone to take a look, give me a shout and I can at least give you some quick feedback. Other folks of note from this forum are Ryan from Vitopian and Dr. Marie who are both well versed with penalties and good, honest folks.
Hope that helps
Marcus
-
I imagine quite a few would, even if they do not explicitly mention. If you find a company or agency that you like the look of, it's always worth dropping them a message to see if they would do this service for you.
On that note, have a look at SEOMoz's recommended company list and see if any of those companies offer what you're looking for, or if they have expertise and/or a portfolio with companies in your industry - that's always a good sign.
If you'd like to go down the route of self-diagnosis, I'd highly recommend the Panguin tool and MyTrafficDropped.com. Both are great diagnosis and analysis tools, while also providing you with actionable advice. MyTrafficDropped also provides consultancy for penalty removal.
Hope these links help!
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
-
How do I deal with Negative SEO (Spammy Links)?
For the past 12 months, our website has been hit by spammy links with annoying anchor text. We suspected one of our competitor are deploying negative SEO on us. The image is an example of the sites and anchor text we have been spammed with. The frequency is about 1 - 2 spammy links a day. I have a few questions from here onwards: Does those links affect our SEO? (Most are mainly nofollow) Other than disavow, what other stuff can I do? How will google and other search engines see this incident? TcmFsti
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Changsst0 -
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 -
What is left ethical? What is working for offpage SEO? Very long write up in here and my take on things.
Hello,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MarketingOfAmerica
Please ignore misspells and grammar, this was typed quickly as I am spending my time researching not writing a perfect book on it. My goal is to find ethical very hard to get links unlike guest posts which are now dead according to Matt Cutt's blog here http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/guest-blogging/. My journey started with a quick message to Rand Fishkin, he responded the following "Hi Matthew - thankfully, there's literally hundreds of link building methodologies that are still completely legit. Check out http://moz.com/blog/category/link-building and you'll find tons and tons of them. The key is that none are easy, none are particularly scalable, and all of them require doing work that will add value for searchers, for your brand, and for your overall marketing - which is exactly what Google wants to count. Wish you all the best," Thanks Rand Fishkin! So I started my search looking for links that are hard to get other than those that are directories, forum links that are dead and spammy, blog comments which are overused, guest posts, or any type of black hat link. I figured I would start to check what other popular SEO companies were doing and that have been at the top through many of the updates. After running an analysis on the term SEO services I found the following Test 1. I analyzed Main Street Host to start with. If you type in SEO services in Google you can see they are rank 1 for it. After a quick analysis it's easy to see that they have 100's of footer links on clients that they have, some with exact match anchors and some without. My question is, is why is this a viable tactic? Lets take for example the following. If you pull up their http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ stats and look at the inbound links you will come to an exact match anchor right away that says SEO Marketing Company. I went to the weebly link that they have and found that they have put their name at the bottom of this page. Issue 1 - Why is it ok for this type of link, but it's not ok for a template link? Aren't these links suppose to be penalized? Issue 2 - Nothing on the page is even relevant to their link at all. As we have read before, you need to have links surrounding relevant text. Take a look at their backlinks you and you will find almost all of their high quality links are exact match anchors coming from their clients surrounded by irrelevant text. Why is this working? How is this different than a network? What stops someone from just starting a network and dedicating 1 footer link to a full site and putting up dummy info... Anyone can go to Godaddy and purchase a DA 40+ site or so and throw up $20 of content and a footer link. As I dove deeper into finding what is ethical and working I discovered many of the top SEO companies use this. Not just one, but over 20 of them use this same method. Lets use another example. So I started to look at what they did for their clients. How did I know who they worked for? Simple I assume that since they have their link at the bottom of the page and claim that they do SEO for them, they are indeed working for them. So I analyzed the site we talked about a while ago on the Weebly that they had their link on. It's the Valley Art Weebly link if your checking yourself. I quickly found that they are using a network to rank up some of their clients as well. For example http://firesidebookshop.com/index.html Take a look at the link on this page leading to the art place. At first glance the site doesn't look spammy, but try to buy a book, or even order one. Who has an online book store, but doesn't sell books lol? Who also puts interesting links on their home page? This screams network to me. I am willing to bet the following will happen - Matt Cutts and his spam team will ad something like the following to the algorithm or whatever you would like to call it "ignore link if total outbound dofollow links on full site = x amount or higher" = internal Google disavow tool = bye to guest blogging. So what is everyone going to do? Okay it's time to figure out what that number is right? Lets do some tests and lets say that magic number is 5 to 10 links on a whole site. What does this do? This drives the price of quick SEO up again evening the playing field for others using ethical SEO like myself. How do I figure this? Lets face it black hat SEO will never end as long as someone is able to do it. Now since guest posts are gone, the quick link on quality sites surrounded by enough text to count is gone. This means that it will cost extra money, because everyone will be forced to put a max of x amount of links to be safe and for the links to get noticed on a website. So now they have to purchase an established domain that is high enough quality to pass the correct link juice through to a clients site that they want to rank up. Lets figure a few dollars for a unique IP, another few for the hosting, $40 to $100 for the domain if your lucky on Godaddy auctions, and then $40 for the content to make it look realistic if your getting it for $0.01 a word. Plus the time it takes to setup your site. This price of that $30 Odesk guest post backlink just went up to a min of $100 or so. Diving deeper into what's working and moving past the networks, because I feel this will only work temporarily as well if you are brave enough to use this and I know I am not. It doesn't seem to ethical to me at the end of the day even though some may argue, you are just creating more relevant websites which can maximize your traffic streams. The problem is I have stopped here and am stuck. Sure I have looked at http://moz.com/blog/category/link-building and read the most recent post where it talks about 31 types of links. Most of those links don't apply or are outdated and you shouldn't use them. Some of them talk about forum links,directories, bookmarks.. Those have been tactics for years and sure you may find 1 out of 1000 that are good, but the rest are just spam. I have been over to search engine land, and a handful of other sites. I have talked to many other SEO's as well. They are emailing me asking what they should do after guest posts, because they are unsure. The question is, what is ethical? Let say you have a plumber, or a roofer, .gov links are nearly impossible for them and quite frankly that seems spammy to me to even post them on one. I know what many are going to say, build links as if your not worried about Google and you will grow.. Where are you going to build the links to if everything is unethical? As we know clients will walk if they don't see improvements quickly. What's quickly? I would say around the 3 to 6 month period using ethical SEO. Sure there is onpage, a great blog, etc., but what is there left truly ethical for offpage SEO besides some good press releases, some social profile links like a pinterst, and the normal? I must be missing something! I am not looking for the easy way, I am not afraid to get my hands dirty and work hard. If anyone can show me a quick example of a truly ethical link I would be grateful to see this. I can't seem to wrap my head around something that I can do that will last at this point. If you don't want to share it to the world, please PM me. [edited for formatting by Keri Morgret]0 -
Is Yahoo! Directory still a beneficial SEO tactic
For obvious reasons, we have submitted our clients to high authority directories such as Yahoo! Directory and Business.com. However, with all of the algorithm updates lately, we've tried to cut back on the paid directories that we submit our clients to. Having said that, my question is, is Yahoo! Directory still a beneficial SEO tactic? Or are paid directories, with the exception of BBB.com, a bad SEO tactic?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MountainMedia0 -
Negative SEO and when to use to Dissavow tool?
Hi guys I was hoping someone could help me on a problem that has arisen on the site I look after. This is my first SEO job and I’ve had it about 6 months now. I think I’ve been doing the right things so far building quality links from reputable sites with good DA and working with bloggers to push our products as well as only signing up to directories in our niche. So our backlink profile is very specific with few spammy links. Over the last week however we have received a huge increase in backlinks which has almost doubled our linking domains total. I’ve checked the links out from webmaster tools and they are mainly directories or webstat websites like the ones below | siteinfo.org.uk deperu.com alestat.com domaintools.com detroitwebdirectory.com ukdata.com stuffgate.com | We’ve also just launched a new initiative where we will be producing totally new and good quality content 4-5 times a week and many of these new links are pointing to that page which looks very suspicious to me. Does this look like negative Seo to anyone? I’ve read a lot about the disavow tool and it seems people’s opinions are split on when to use it so I was wondering if anyone had any advice on whether to use it or not? It’s easy for me to identify what these new links are, yet some of them have decent DA so will they do any harm anyway? I’ve also checked the referring anchors on Ahrefs and now over 50% of my anchor term cloud are totally unrelated terms to my site and this has happened over the last week which also worries me. I haven’t seen any negative impact on rankings yet but if this carries on it will destroy my link profile. So would it be wise to disavow all these links as they come through or wait to see if they actually have an impact? It should be obvious to Google that there has been a huge spike in links so then the question is would they be ignored or will I be penalised. Any ideas? Thanks in advance Richard
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Rich_9950 -
Finding out why Bing gave page-level penalty?
In the last couple of weeks Bing has gradually removed 5 webpages of my website from their SERP's. The URL's are totally gone. They all had top 5 rankings and just got removed out of nothing. Have can I investigate what went wrong with these pages? Are here perhaps experts who are willing to investigate this for a fee? How can I restore a page-level penalty? I have no messages in my Bing Webmastertools account.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | wellnesswooz0 -
White Papers! Is this still good for SEO
Does publishing a white paper good for SEO? We are trying to decide to publish one or not for the purpose of SEO. If it will not help, we will spend money for other things.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AppleCapitalGroup0 -
How do you keep a record of your onsite SEO changes
Hi Everyone, I'm new to the whole SEO process, so was wondering if anyone can help me. I want to keep a record of all SEO activities in one place for the website i'm trying to optimise for. I have created an excel sheet which have the follwoing tabs -Overview & Rankings
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mcliddy
- Keyword Research Competitior Analysis
- Keyword Distribution Map Onpage SEO Link Ideas Link Research
-Link Building Log
- PPC Campaign Does this all seem correct?
Could anyone help in telling me what process you do to keep a record of all SEO onsite activity? I hope this isn't a stupid post, but help would be very much appreciated Many Thanks Matt0