Is my site penalized by Google?
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Let's say my website is aaaaa.com and company name is aaaaa Systems. When I search Google aaaaa my site do not come up at all. When I search for "aaaaa Systems" it comes up. But in WMT I see quite a few clicks from aaaaa as keyword. Most of the traffic is brand keywords only. I never received any manual penalty in WMT ever. Is the site penalized or regular algorithm issues?
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Thank you Gary for your effort and great insight.
I didn't realize we were ranking in Google search sites other than Google.com . But it explains why WMT says we are getting some traffic from Google. Unfortunately we are not showing up for our own domain for the term "Armia" for almost an year now. So it is not a regular recalculation.
This is our main corporate site. Most of the blog updates and social channels are updated through two different product sites. The social channels connected is our own product site
Good point the keywords. May be it is time to retire it. I knew Google stopped taking them into account. I didnt know it impacts adversely.
Thanks again Gary.
Aji
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Hello,
From what i understand i face a similar problem, you can see the topic here!
I believe that your site is not penalized but something else is going wrong. I am still looking to find whats wrong
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Interesting, I found your site via your linked in account and was able to test what you were saying.
Interestingly I see that you rank as expected in all Google search sites except google.com?gl=us
When in the Google US results your site comes up in 48th place for your careers page. Not your homepage, this makes me wonder if Google is just doing some re-indexing of your homepage. How long have you noticed this? Sometimes with excessive link building or marketing it can cause a page to temporarily disappear for some keywords.
On the subject of keywords, you are using the the keywords meta tag, considering you have such little content on your homepage it is not wise to keep this tag and Google has said for many years now that it is not used and has been thought to be used negatively by Google bot.
If your ranking has disappeared for just a few days then be patient for a few more.
I noticed your name is not a madeup name it means army in Polish and it is also a Polish punk rock band. I do wonder if there is some confusion there when you look at the other results showing. But my instinct is that your homepage is just being recalculated for some reason. I see this happen all the time to my site when my rankings are about to change significantly in a positive way.
I would also look at putting your contact information on the homepage into rich snippets to help Google identify you correctly.
Also your blog has not been updated for 1 year
Also I see that your social media buttons on the bottom of your site do not go to the correct sites, it looks like it points to the social media site of the websites template creator?
I hope some of this helps you.
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Thank you Moosa.
But the first word is a madeup word without much competition. And our name was ranking in the first 2-3 spots for years. Now it suddenly removed from first 100 positions.
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Thank you Bryan , Gary for your thoughtful responses.
The website is not removed from index. I get few hundred visitors per month Google through brand key words. When I do site: I see most of my pages in the index. So it is not removed from index. WMT even reports the my page rank for my domain without tld as 2.5.
The domainname without tld is not very competitive, it is a a made up name.
I tried without any personalization in google with https://www.google.com/search?pws=0 . Still no change though.
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No let’s say your company name is “Marketing Systems” if you type the world marketing you don’t show up and it perfectly make sense because it’s too competitive keyword and it’s indeed really difficult to get a first page position.
From the situation that you mentioned in your question, it didn’t seems like a penalty it’s just that the first name is competitive and you are not ranking for it!
Just my 2 Cents!
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Are the words competitive keywords or are they unique to your brand? If they are competitive its possible you don't have the power to rank for them or Google thinks you have an EMD or are link building those keywords excessively. Without seeing the site its hard to answer otherwise.
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Hey AJLabs!
For starters (if you haven't already), try using the "site:" command in Google.
Example, instead of just searching for "aaaaa" or "aaaaa.com", type "site:aaaaa.com" into Google and see what it yields. This will tell you whether or not you've been completely removed from their index or not. But being that you are seeing clicks in WMT and when you type your brand in you find yourself, I don't think you've been penalized. Would there be any reason you can think of that you'd have been issued a penalty? Sorry for the edits. I always rethink my answers after the fact haa
Hope this helps!
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