Determining Penalization
-
Hello,
I have a site that initially ranked in the first 30 google results for targeted keywords. However, after I contracted out further SEO work to a consultant, my site is nowhere to be found for any keywords. I'm afraid that they have done something to get me penalized, but I'm not sure how I would tell if 1) I have in fact been penalized and 2) what the issue(s) are so I can fix them. Thanks in advance and any help would be appreciated.
-Alex
-
I see very few links at all. http://gyazo.com/21b501732b681d58943fe23f92297dbd.png
See that? Zero links on OSE.
ahrefs.com says you have 7 linking root domains. That's nothing. Nothing at all. GWT's link report is the most untrustworthy of all of them, don't pay much heed to what it tells you.
"I'm less concerned with the poor design right now and more concerned with the 0 traffic that's coming to it."
STOP RIGHT THERE!
This mindset needs to change if you want to have any success in your internet marketing campaign. Your website's poor design is the first and foremost reason you are not ranking well and you will most likely never rank well with a poor design. And even if you somehow were able to rank well it wouldn't matter when your bounce rate hovers right around 99% as nobody wants to spend any time on a page with terrible design and nothing going on.
Google's ranking factors have everything to do with your design. And your ability to gain links and retain visitors does as well.
If your site is interesting and unique you will find it much easier to gain links organically. If your site looks like poo you will find it incredibly hard.
If your site has a long average visit duration and low bounce rate Google will notice and determine that people are finding it useful. If people are visiting multiple pages during their time on site you will see this as well. What do your analytics say for these factors? I'd bet they're not good.
Any digital marketer will tell you that your site's design is everything. It's like saying "it doesn't matter what my restaurant looks like, if we don't have a sign on the street nobody will come." That may be true. But when people come in and your restaurant is filthy and you're using lawn furniture purchased from big lots you will quickly find that the place is empty.. YOUR WEBSITE IS YOUR STORE FRONT! Invest in this.
Bottom line is you need a marketing campaign launched for this site. And you need a better site. That's the honest truth and I can't tell you anything different. Nor can anybody else. There's nothing happening with your site preventing it from being ranked. But there's also nothing happening with it causing it to be considered authoritative (which would lead Google to ranking it).
That's the best advice I think I can give you and I wish you the best of luck.
-
-
They worked on the site for about 6 or 7 months
-
Organic link-building. But I'm not sure if it was organic or not. You said you could tell by the domain, do you see the links as "poison"?
-
I'm less concerned with the poor design right now and more concerned with the 0 traffic that's coming to it. I could have the greatest design, but if no one can find it...
-
I see that I have a few links to the Webmaster Tools "links to your site" section, not zero.
-
Yes, I agree the content could be linked better.
-
-
I recommend a company like Portent who has a team of web developers and designers on staff... cause that's definitely an aspect you could use.
-
Okay let's back up a second.
1.) How long did you employ the consultant?
2.) What work did they say they were doing or were going to do? Explain how these services went.
3.) Who designed this website? It needs help. It's so incredibly drab and so strangely arranged. I would be looking at a complete redesign.
4.) You have a total of zero linking root domains with zero links pointing to you. You will never ever rank this way.
5.) Why is your content hidden? By looking at your sitemap I'm able to determine that somewhere you have more than one page and maybe even some articles. But there is absolutely ZERO navigation on your homepage... Why are you hiding this? How would you react if you landed on this page? It looked like it was under construction and nothing more than a form template at first and if I were browsing I would have left immediately.
What's your bounce rate like?
Sorry if this is harsh, but these are a few quick easy things that any SEO worth-a-darn should be able to tell you in mere seconds. Find a new marketing firm who knows what they're doing. It'll change your life.
-
In order to truly get potential answers to these questions we would need the domain in question. Without it all we could offer is guesses.
As for how to determine penalty, if it is a manual penalty you will see notice in Google Webmaster Tools. Login to your account and find the manual action section as well as the notifications section. However, if it is an algorithmic penalty you will likely not see anything here.
There's a good chance whoever you "contracted" did black-hat SEO tactics and built poison links. This would be the most likely scenario. I could tell you for sure if you gave me the domain... But that'd be my guess from the limited information offered here. I'd definitely fire them ASAP either way if you haven't already.
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
-
Will Google Also Penalize Desktop Rankings If Your Site is Not Mobile Friendly?
Apologies if this question has already been answered. I was unable to find it. For desktop organic rankings: Will Google take into consideration mobile-readiness as a ranking factor? Thanks in advance for any reply, Kind regards,
Technical SEO | | Eric_Lifescript
Eric Darby1 -
Anything new if determining how many of a sites pages are in Google's supplemental index vs the main index?
Since site:mysite.com *** -sljktf stopped working to find pages in the supplemental index several years ago has anyone found another way to identify content that has been regulated to the supplemental index?
Technical SEO | | SEMPassion0 -
Penalized domain redirected to the non-penalized one...
I've a technical question , For example site A was penalized by google updates, panda and penguin both and site b is in the same niche and it's running good and never been penalized by updates. If I redirect site A to Site B with 301 status code(permanent redirect), will Google penalize the site B too? because penalties travel from old domain to new one as per google's algorithms. And If yes then how can I stop my competitor from removing redirection of penalized domain to mine?
Technical SEO | | hammadrafique0 -
What would be considered a bad ratio to determine Index Bloat?
I am using Annie Cushing's most excellent site audit checklist from Google Docs. My question concerns Index Bloat because it is mentioned in her "Index" tab. We have 6,595 indexed pages and only 4,226 of those pages have received 1 or more visits since January 1 2013. Is this an acceptable ratio? If not, why not and what would be an acceptable ratio? I understand the basic concept that "dissipation of link juice and constrained crawl budget can have a significant impact on SEO traffic." [Thanks to Reid Bandremer http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2013/04/08/fifteen-minute-seo-health-check/#sr=g&m=o&cp=or&ct=-tmc&st=(opu%20qspwjefe)&ts=1385081787] If we make this an action item I'd like to have some idea how to prioritize it compared to other things that must be done. Thanks all!
Technical SEO | | danatanseo1 -
Determining the Cause of a Penalty
I received a link removal request from a site who said that they were penalized. I confirmed that they were #1 for the competitive keyword phrase that is also their domain name and now they are #10. Here are some things I noticed about the site: Over 2,500 linking domains. Dozens of high quality linking domains like Huffington Post and Mashable. Some off topic guest post links, e.g. on a SEO site. Guest post anchor text was usually their site name which is an exact match domain. Lots of top 100 resource pages that received good organic links. Infographics with links using their domain name as the anchor text. Relatively few spammy links according to Open Site Explorer. Overall their site's links were engineered but using tactics that most would consider "white hat." I don't think they violated any Google Webmaster Guidelines. Why were they penalized? What do you think?
Technical SEO | | ProjectLabs0 -
Brand New Site Penalized?
I recently launched 2 completely separate and unrelated websites at the same time. Both are new domains and hosting accounts. neither have any links. One is ranking for a branded search and the other is not. The interesting thing is that I tested both sites on the back end of my server before launch. The site that is not ranking for branded search IS ranking still on the back end of my site for the branded search. I have removed all content and 301 redirected the testing urls back to my portfolio page. Could this be do to Google indexing one but not the other. Does it have anything to do with testing on my server first and my DA being higher than current new sites? Or is it something completely different I'm missing completely. Is this a Penalty?
Technical SEO | | CDUBP0 -
How does Google determine freshness of content?
With the changes in the Google algorithm emphasizing freshness of content, I was wondering how they determine freshness and what constitutes new content. For instance, if I write a major update to a story I published last July, is the amended story fresh? Is there anything I can do in addition to publishing brand new content to make Google sure they see all my new content?
Technical SEO | | KnutDSvendsen0 -
Website has been penalized?
Hey guys, We have been link building and optimizing our website since the beginning of June 2010. Around August-September 2010, our site appeared on second page for the keywords we were targeting for around a week. They then dropped off the radar - although we could still see our website as #1 when searching for our company name, domain name, etc. So we figured we had been put into the 'google sandbox' sort of thing. That was fine, we dealt with that. Then in December 2010, we appeared on the first page for our keywords and maintained first page rankings, even moving up the top 10 for just over a month. On January 13th 2011, we disappeared from Google for all of the keywords we were targeting, we don't even come up in the top pages for company name search. Although we do come up when searching for our domain name in Google and we are being cached regularly. Before we dropped off the rankings in January, we did make some semi-major changes to our site, changing meta description, changing content around, adding a disclaimer to our pages with click tracking parameters (this is when SEOmoz prompted us that our disclaimer pages were duplicate content) so we added the disclaimer URL to our robots.txt so Google couldn't access it, we made the disclaimer an onclick link instead of href, we added nofollow to the link and also told Google to ignore these parameters in Google Webmaster Central. We have fixed the duplicate content side of things now, we have continued to link build and we have been adding content regularly. Do you think the duplicate content (for over 13,000 pages) could have triggered a loss in rankings? Or do you think it's something else? We index pages meta description and some subpages page titles and descriptions. We also fixed up HTML errors signaled in Google Webmaster Central and SEOmoz. The only other reason I think we could have been penalized, is due to having a link exchange script on our site, where people could add our link to their site and add theirs to ours, but we applied the nofollow attribute to those outbound links. Any information that will help me get our rankings back would be greatly appreciated!
Technical SEO | | bigtimeseo0