Fetch as Google temporarily lifting a penalty?
-
Hi, I was wondering if anyone has seen this behaviour before? I haven't!
We have around 20 sites and each one has lost all of its rankings (not in index at all) since the medic update apart from specifying a location on the end of a keyword.
I set to work trying to identify a common issue on each site, and began by improving speed issues in insights. On one site I realised that after I had improved the speed score and then clicked "fetch as google" the rankings for that site all returned within seconds.
I did the same for a different site and exactly the same result. Cue me jumping around the office in delight! The pressure is off, people's jobs are safe, have a cup of tea and relax.
Unfortunately this relief only lasted between 6-12 hours and then the rankings go again. To me it seems like what is happening is that the sites are all suffering from some kind of on page penalty which is lifted until the page can be assessed again and when it is the penalty is reapplied.
Not one to give up I set about methodically making changes until I found the issue. So far I have completely rewritten a site, reduced over use of keywords, added over 2000 words to homepage. Clicked fetch as google and the site came back - for 6 hours..... So then I gave the site a completely fresh redesign and again clicked fetch as google, and same result. Since doing all that, I have swapped over to https, 301 redirected etc and now the site is completely gone and won't come back after fetching as google. Uh!
So before I dig myself even deeper, has anyone any ideas?
Thanks.
-
Unfortunately it's going to be difficult to dig deeper into this without knowing the site - are you able to share the details?
I'm with Martijn that there should be no connection between these features. The only thing I have come up with that could plausibly cause anything like what you are seeing is something related to JavaScript execution (and this would not be a feature working as it's intended to work). We know that there is a delay between initial indexing and JavaScript indexing. It seems plausible to me that if there were a serious enough issue with the JS execution / indexing that either that step failed or that it made the site look spammy enough to get penalised that we could conceivably see the behaviour you describe - where it ranks until Google executes the JS.
I guess my first step to investigating this would be to look at the JS requirements on your site and consider the differences between with and without JS rendering (and if there is any issue with the chrome version that we know executes the JS render at Google's side).
Interested to hear if you discover anything more.
-
Hey, it’s good to have a fresh pair of eyes on it. There may something else as simple that I’ve missed.
Rankings check on my Mac, 2 x webservers via Remote Desktop in different locations, 2 x independent ranking checkers and they all show the same... recovery for 12ish hours, along with traffic and conversions. Then nothing.
When the rankings dissapear I can hit fetch as again straight away and they come straight back. If I leave it for days, then they’re gone for days, until I hit fetch then straight back.
cheers
-
Ok, that still doesn't mean that they're not personalized. But I'll skip on that part for now.
In the end, the changes that you're seeing aren't triggered by what you're doing with Fetch as Google. I'll leave it up to some others to see if they'll shine a light on the situation. -
Hi,
Thanks,
They’re not personalised as my ranking checkers don’t show personalised results
-
Hi,
I'm afraid I have to help you with this dream, there is no connection whatsoever between the rankings and the feature to Fetch as Google within Google Search Console. What likely is happening is that you're already getting personalized results and within a certain timeframe, the ads won't be shown as the results will be different as Google thinks that you've already seen the first results on the page the first time that you Googled this.
Fetch as Google doesn't provide any signal to the regular ranking engines to say: "Hey, we've fetched something new and now it's going to make an impact on this". Definitely not at the speed that you're describing (within seconds).
Martijn.
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
-
Canonical error from Google
Moz couldn't explain this properly and I don't understand how to fix it. Google emailed this morning saying "Alternate page with proper canonical tag." Moz also kinda complains about the main URL and the main URL/index.html being duplicate. Of course they are. The main URL doesn't work without the index.html page. What am I missing? How can I fix this to eliminate this duplicate problem which to me isn't a problem?
Technical SEO | | RVForce0 -
Google Six Pack Meta Descriptions
Anyone know of some good resources on the way to control the meta descriptions in the Google six pack for a branded search. Google appears to often bypass the meta description and pull random text from the page. We have tested this by adding the brand name to the meta description and this appears to help but doesn't always sort the issue. You often get the same results with the site comand. It not really an SEO issue more a branding one. Anyone get any ideas or resources they can point me at?
Technical SEO | | highwayfive0 -
Google’s Latest Manual Action Penalty: Spammy Structured Markup
Anyone out there begin receiving this and or know when it started? Google has recently began sending a new manual action spam notification to webmasters for “spammy structured markup” also known as rich snippet spam. Your pal, Chenzo
Technical SEO | | Chenzo0 -
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 -
How do i show my link xls file to google?
i have removed lots of links and contacted lots of webmaster to clean up my link profile. I have a large xls file to send to google for them to see that we have done a lot to clean up the bad links. How would i show this file to google? is there a place where I can post it? or email ? thank you nick
Technical SEO | | orion680 -
Google Cache is not showing in my page
Hello Everyone, I have issue in my Page, My category page (http://www.bannerbuzz.com/custom-vinyl-banners.html) is regular cached in past, but before sometime it can't show the cached result in SERP and not show in cached result , I have also fetch this link in google web master, but can't get the result, it is showing following message. 404. That’s an error. The requested URL /search?q=cache%3A http%3A//www.bannerbuzz.com/custom-vinyl-banners.html was not found on this server. That’s all we know. My category page rank is 2 and its keyword is on first in google.com, so i am little bit worried about this page cache issue, Can someone please tell me why is this happening? Is this a temporary issue? Help me to solve out this cache issue and once again my page will regularly cache in future. Thanks
Technical SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
Mobile Google Not Indexing Mobile Website
Google currently does not index our mobile website. It has the WWW website in it's index. When a user from a mobile phone clicks on a mobile search result for WWW we redirect them to our mobile website. This is posing problems for us as our mobile website is a fraction of the # of pages/sections as our WWW. So for example, mobile search results show that we have a "careers" section; but that's not the case for the mobile website. As a result a user gets a 404. How do we force mobile Google to index our mobile website instead of our WWW?
Technical SEO | | RBA0 -
Google not visiting my site
Hi my site www.in2town.co.uk which is a lifestyle magazine has gone under a major refit. I am still working on it but it should be ready by the end of this week or sooner but one problem i have is, google is not visiting the site. I took a huge gamble to redo the site, even though before the refit i was getting a few thousand visitors a day, i wanted to make the site better as i was getting google webmaster errors. But now it seems google is not visiting the site. for example i am using sh404sef and i have put friendly url in the site and on the home page it has its name and meta tag but when you look at google it is not giving the site a name. Also it has not visited the site since october 13th Can anyone advise how to encourage google to visit the site please.
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860