Google Penguin penalty is automated or manual?
-
Hi,
I have seen some of our competitors are missing from top SERP and seems to be penalised as per this penalty checker: http://pixelgroove.com/serp/sandbox_checker/. Is this right tool to check penalty? Or any other good tools available?
Are these penalties because of recent Penguin update? If so, is this a automated or manual penalty from Google? I don't think all of these tried with black-hat techniques and got penalised. The new penguin update might triggered their back-links causing this penalty.
Even we dropped for last 2 weeks. What's the solution for this? How effectively link-audit works?
Thanks,
Satish
-
-
Whats the domain name?
-
Hi Furtak,
Thanks for the response. Here I have uploaded our ranking screenshot. Please have a look and let us know your valuable understandings. Based on that, we conclude something to work on like link audit if we are certain of it.
We have improved ranking when we fixed certain broken links, but dropped on Sep 17th, which is too early to blame on Penguin (my guess). One thing to notice here is that we had reclaimed some links (around 10) on 15th and we dropped on 17th. We reclaimed more than 50 links for last one month. Do these redirects pushed us down?
We dropped more on USA.
Thanks,
Satish
-
Hi Satish
First of all. Those are only tools. They predict if you have penalty or not but won't tell you in 100%: "You've been penalized". Im not using that kind of tools to tell somebody he was penalized or not. Nothing will replace digging into data.
Penguin penalty is "automated penalty" (real time now) and you won't see messages in google search console.
How effectively? If you got enough number of good links, then you have the chance to bounce back after link audit completed. If you don't then you can see no rise or not to previous serps but seo after will be 100% effective again (at least for a start till next messing with google). Also there's another option - that's not link related penalty.
Choice is yours.
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
-
What does Google's Spammy Structured Markup Penalty consist of?
Hey everybody,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | klaver
I'm confused about the Spammy Structured Markup Penalty: "This site may not perform as well in Google results because it appears to be in violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines." Does this mean the rich elements are simply removed from the snippets? Or will there be an actual drop in rankings? Can someone here tell from experience? Thanks for your help!1 -
Separating the syndicated content because of Google News
Dear MozPeople, I am just working on rebuilding a structure of the "news" website. For some reasons, we need to keep syndicated content on the site. But at the same time, we would like to apply for google news again (we have been accepted in the past but got kicked out because of the duplicate content). So I am facing the challenge of separating the Original content from Syndicated as requested by google. But I am not sure which one is better: *A) Put all syndicated content into "/syndicated/" and then Disallow /syndicated/ in robots.txt and set NOINDEX meta on every page. **But in this case, I am not sure, what will happen if we will link to these articles from the other parts of the website. We will waste our link juice, right? Also, google will not crawl these pages, so he will not know about no indexing. Is this OK for google and google news? **B) NOINDEX meta on every page. **Google will crawl these pages, but will not show them in the results. We will still loose our link juice from links pointing to these pages, right? So ... is there any difference? And we should try to put "nofollow" attribute to all the links pointing to the syndicated pages, right? Is there anything else important? This is the first time I am making this kind of "hack" so I am exactly sure what to do and how to proceed. Thank you!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Lukas_TheCurious1 -
New Domain Name or Keep going - Help not Recovering after Penguin
Hi Moz Friends I wonder if you can help me , a while ago we had a Penguin Penalty and lost our Rankings. After Months of work Disavow and Reconsiderations , Google sent me a message in Webmaster Tools to confirm the Penalty had been uplifted. Since then we havent recovered. I have been working with Bloggers to build relevant safe links, each having a DA of between 10-30. We have developed a Mobile Friendly Website and ios and Android Apps. We have improved Site Speed and moved to a Server within the same Country. We add lots of content and believe we have ticked all the boxes for onpage optimisation. However our DA and PA seems to have dropped slightly after Moz update today. We seem to be jumping in the serps, one day page 4 for "fancy dress" the next day nowhere to be found. I'm not sure what to do next. I'm not expecting to jump back to page 1 for the main keywords but some positive movement would be nice, especially as there are Lower DA Website, not mobile friendly or as fast above us in the serps. What I am looking for I guess is any ideas from you and also what you think about this idea A few people have mentioned that we might stand more of a chance using our domain name example.com instead of example.co.uk. example.com has never been used and is totaly clean (no penaltys ect..) Do we use example.com and move the website and content away from example.co.uk ? if so do we use redirects or would that just pass any hold thats on example.co.uk to the .com version Ideas Welcome Thanks Adam
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AMG1000 -
Penguin issues
Hello everyone, I run about 10 sites and pretty much every single one got hit by Penguin (the traffic plummeted on 24th April). I have never done reciprocal links (except 1 domain upto 2005 or so), I have never bought links, I have never spammed message boards or anything like that (except 1 different domain got hit by negative SEO by someone else) and I have never employed anyone to do any of the above. The way I have created sites for the last 10 years is to try to make them useful and let the links build naturally which more or less worked until April this year. I've been tearing my hair out ever since. The only thing you can say about all of them (apart from that I own them but I've been careful with whois etc) is that the link profile is 100% natural apart from the 2 provisos above. Since April I've hired people but I'm down $20K but not any better in the rankings. A few of the sites are: short-hairstyles.com was number 1 for short hairstyles and short haircuts for years then Penguin came and its dropped off for both. It had 10000 or so spammy message board links posted by someone as negative seo I have got some removed but google webmaster tools still reports them as there. There are tentative signs of recovery (maybe) but no traffic increase. 1001-hairstyles.com has been there or there abouts for 10 years for the keyword hairstyles and hair styles until April. A site ourlipsaresealed.skyblogs.be has 30000 links to it (there are only 40000 total) with the anchor text haarstijls which is dutch for hairstyles, I don't think its malicious just they set a template and do a new page every day and they also link in the same way to a competitor who wasn't affected. An seo firm have been working on this one for a few months, the traffic increased 50% a couple of weeks ago but bombed the day after to worse than before. Prom-hairstyles.org when the same way as above in April. The only back link oddity is a site polyvore.com links to it about 400 times (out of 1000 or so total) they are using our pictures to sell their prom dresses (with out permission) but mostly deep link. Most of the other sites went in a similar way but have no obvious backlink anomalies. Do I use the link disavowel tool? I am a bit wary of it because if you watch matt cutts video he keeps reiterating that the tool is for people who have used dodgy link practises in the past and want to do a clean up but that isn't me so am I owning up to something I haven't done by using it? Are the search results as strange in everybody's niche? In mine there is some real dross as well as loads of pinterest and other user generated stuff. Sorry to go on for so long and thanks for getting this far. Ian
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jwdl0 -
Manual Penalty Removed - Recovery Times...
Howdy Mozzers, For anyone who has had experience of a manual penalty i'd appreciate your feedback. How long did it take to recover from a Manual Penalty? Of course every situation is different and its only been 8 days so perhaps it's to soon. Below is the email we received, I highlighted "believed" they didn't state we had. We highlighted a bunch of back links we didn't like however most of these remain in our profile in GWT so not sure what was really the problem. "Previously the webspam team had taken manual action on your site because we believed it violated our quality guidelines. After reviewing your reconsideration request, we have revoked this manual action. It may take some time before our indexing and ranking systems are updated to reflect the new status of your site." Your feedback would be greatly appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RobertChapman0 -
Massive drop in Google traffic after upping pagecount 8-fold.
I run a book recommendation site -- Flashlight Worthy. It's a collection of original, topical book lists: "The Best Books for Healthy (Vegetarian) Babies" or "Keystone Mysteries: The Best Mystery Books Set in Pennsylvania" or "5 Books That Helped Me Discover and Love My Italian Heritage". It's been online for 4+ years. Historically, it's been made up of: a single home page ~50 "category" pages, and ~425 "book list" pages. (That 50 number and 425 number both started out much smaller and grew over time but has been around 425 for the last year or so as I've focused my time elsewhere.) On Friday, June 15 we made a pretty big change to the site -- we added a page for every Author who has a book that appears on a list. This took the number of pages in our sitemap from ~500 to 4,149 overnight. If an Author has more than one book on the site, the page shows every book they have on the site, such as this page: http://www.flashlightworthybooks.com/books-by/Roald-Dahl/2805 ..but the vast majority of these author pages have just one book listed, such as this page: http://www.flashlightworthybooks.com/books-by/Barbara-Kilarski/2116 Obviously we did this as an SEO play -- we figured that our content was getting ~1,000 search entries a day for such a wide variety of queries that we may as well create pages that would make natural landing pages for a broader array of queries. And it was working... 5 days after we launched the pages, they had ~100 new searches coming in from Google. (Ok, it peaked at 100 and dropped down to a steady 60 or so day within a few days, but still. And then it trailed off for the last week, dropping lower and lower every day as if they realized it was repurposed content from elsewhere on our site...) Here's the problem: For the last several years the site received ~30,000 search entries a month... a little more than 1,000 a day on weekdays, a little lighter on weekends. This ebbed and flowed a bit as Google made tweaked things (Panda for example), as we garnered fresh inbound links, as the GoodReads behemoth stole some traffic... but by and large, traffic was VERY stable. And then, on Saturday, exactly 3 weeks after we added all these pages, the bottom fell out of our search traffic. Instead of ~1,000 entries a day, we've had ~300 on Saturday and Sunday and it looks like we'll have a similar amount today. And I know this isn't just some Analytics reporting problem as Chartbeat is showing the same drop. As search is ~80% of my traffic I'm VERY eager to solve this problem... So: 1. Do you think the drop is related to my upping my pagecount 8-fold overnight? 2. Do you think I'd climb right back into Google's good graces if I removed all the pages at once? Or just all the pages that only list one author (which would be the vasy majority). 3. Have you ever heard of a situation like this? Where Google "punishes" a site for creating new pages out of existing content? Really, it's useful content -- and these pages are better "answers" for a lot of queries. When someone searches for "Norah Ephron books" it's better they land on a page of ours that pulls together the 4 books we have than taking them to a page that happens to have just one book on it among 5 or 6 others by other authors. What else? Thanks so much, help is very appreciated. Peter
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | petestein1
Flashlight Worthy Book Recommendations
Recommending books so good, they'll keep you up past your bedtime. 😉0 -
Google Penguin for non-English queries?
Does anybody know if non-English queries were also 'hit' by the Google Penguin update? All Penguin horror stories out there are from sites focusing on English queries, and in some (Dutch) industries I'm monitoring, some sites with spammy backlink profiles are still ranking.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RBenedict0 -
Anchor text penalty doesn't work?!
How do you think, does the anchortext penalty exactly work? Keyword domains obviously can't over-optimize for their main keyword (for example notebook.com for the keyword notebook). And a lot of non-keyword-domains do optimize especially in the beginning for their main keyword to get a good ranking in google (and it always works). Is there any particular point (number of links) I can reach, optimizing for one keyword, after what i'm gonna get a penalty?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TheLastSeo0