Do I have a manual penalty?
-
My rankings and traffic suddenly went down about 50% around the end of Feb 2013.
I never received any warnings in webmaster tools (and as far as I know never did anything even vaguely black hat) but thought it might be a penalty since the drop was so steep and as far as I know there were no major algo updates at the time.
I sent a reconsideration request expecting to receive an answer that I have no manual penalty. Instead, I received the following email:
We received a request from a site owner to reconsider how we index the following site: http://www.sitename.com/.
We've now reviewed your site. When we review a site, we check to see if it's in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines. If we don't find any problems, we'll reconsider our indexing of your site. If your site still doesn't appear in our search results, check our Help
There have been no changes in my rankings.
Does this reply mean that I have/had a manual penalty?
-
Hi Jill
Every so often I hear from someone who gets this sort of ambiguous reply. It's not that helpful, but here's what I can tell you from past experience.
If there was a manual penalty: the Google reviewer has not mentioned that it is still present. To me this suggests that any manual penalty that you may have briefly had, if any at all, has now been lifted.
Usually, when you get a reconsideration request that explicitly confirms this, it says that you may need to wait a while until your status is restored.
Because this is also omitted, it leads me to suggest that you may have an algorithmic penalty on your site that is present. We haven't seen a penguin algorithm refresh for a while, so it may suggest that your site may be suffering from duplicate content and/or Panda issues.
If you scroll to near the end of this article http://www.seowizz.net/2012/10/the-disavow-tool-works-real-sites-real-recoveries.html it features your specific reply and also draws the conclusion that there is no manual penalty, but there is an algorithmic one.
I think it may be a Panda issue, you can cross reference the time of your penalty with the Panguin tool for analytics, which is really helpful. If one of the last Panda refreshes matches up with your dates, it at least gives you a starting point.
Hope this helps
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
-
Recovering from a Google penalty
Hi there, So about 3.5 weeks ago I noticed my website (www.authenticstyle.co.uk) had gone from ranking in second place for our main key phrase "web design dorset" to totally dropping off the SERP's for that particular search phrase - it's literally no where to be seen. It seems that other pages of my website still rank, but the homepage. I then noticed that I had an unread alert in my Google Search Console account to say that a staging site we were hosting on a subdomain (the subdomain was domvs.authenticstyle.co.uk) had hacked content - it was a couple of PDF files with weird file names. The strange thing is we'd taken this staging site down a few weeks earlier, BUT one of my staff had left an A record set up in our Cloudflare account pointing to that staging server - they'd forgotten to remove it when removing the staging site. I then removed the A record, myself and submitted a reconsideration request on Google Search Console (which I still haven't received confirmation of) in the hope of everything sorting itself out. Since then I've also grabbed a Moz Pro account to try and dig a little deeper, but without any success. We have a few warnings for old 404's, some missing meta descs on some pages, and some backlinks that have accumulated over time that have hghish spam rating, but nothing major - nothing that would warrant a penalty as far as I can tell. From what I can make out, we've been issued a penalty on our homepage only, but I don't understand why we would get penalised for hacked content if that site domvs.authenticstyle.co.uk no longer existed (would it just be due to that erroneous A record we forgot to remove?). I contacted a few freelance SEO experts and one came back to me saying I'd done everything correctly and that I should see our site appearing again in a few days after submitting the reconsideration request. Its been 3 weeks and nothing. I'm at a huge loss as to how my site can recover from this. What would you recommend? I even tried getting our homepage to rank for a variation of "web design dorset", but it seems our homepage has been penalised for anything with "dorset" in the keyphrase. Any pointers would be HUGELY appreciated. Thanks in advance! Will
Technical SEO | | wsmith7270 -
How to manually create sitemap with 301 redirrctions?
Hi there I've just redirected a few of my pages (created in Dreamweaver) using the PHP Redirect function, I am wondering how do I create a manual sitemap to submit to Google to reflect this or will Google pick it up automatically based on the below? Example:
Technical SEO | | IsaCleanse
URL Being redirected: http://industrytix.com.au/cuban-club-perth-tickets.php **New URL: **[http://industrytix.com.au/buy-tickets/cuban-club-perth-nyd/ Redirect code:](http://industrytix.com.au/buy-tickets/cuban-club-perth-nyd/) Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "Location: http://industrytix.com.au/buy-tickets/cuban-club-perth-nyd/" );
?>0 -
Another client copies everything to blogspot. Is that what keeps her site from ranking? Or what? Appears to be a penalty somewhere but can't find it.
This client has a brand new site: http://www.susannoyesandersonpoems.com Her previous site was really bad for SEO, yet at one time she actually ranked on the first page for "LDS poems." She came to me because she lost rank. I checked things out and found some shoddy SEO work by a very popular Wordpress webhoste that I will leave unnamed. If you do a backlink analysis you can see the articles and backlinks they created. But there are so few, so I'm not sure if that was it, or it just was because of the fact that her site was so poorly optimized and Google made a change, and down she fell. Here's the only page she had on the LDS poems topic in her old site: https://web.archive.org/web/20130820161529/http://susannoyesandersonpoems.com/category/lds-poetry/ Even the links in the nav were bad as they were all images. And that ranked in position 2 I think she said. Even with her new site, she continues to decline. In fact she is nowhere to be found for main keywords making me think there is a penalty. To try and build rank for categories, I'm allowing google to index the category landing pages and had her write category descriptions that included keywords. We are also listing the categories on the left and linking to those category pages. Maybe those pages are watered down by the poem excerpts?? Here's an example of a page we want to rank: http://susannoyesandersonpoems.com/category/lds-poetry/ Any help from the peanut gallery?
Technical SEO | | katandmouse0 -
Manual Webspam Error. Same Penalty on all sites on Webmaster Tools account.
My URL is: www.ebuzznet.comToday when i checked webmaster tools under manual spam section. I got Manual spam and reason was Thin content with little or no added value. Then I checked other sites from same webmaster tools account, there are 11 sites, all of them received same manual action. I never received any mail, no notification on site messages section regarding this manual action. I just need confirmation whether it is something to do with any error in webmaster tools or all of the sites really received manual spam actions.Most of the article on sites are above 500 words, quality content (no spun or copied).Looking for suggestions, answers
Technical SEO | | ndroidgalaxy0 -
No manual spam actions found - still my site does not rank
I noticed it on the 1st of October 2012 - that all my rankings disappeared - i filed a reconsideration request w google and i got this - No manual spam actions found. I have no idea why my site would have been subject to an algo change which made my rankings completely go away - i have not used spam, not used any kind of linkbuilding. Can you guys look at my site and see if you have any ideas: http://tinyurl.com/9a5k38u Thank you, Cary
Technical SEO | | CMTM0 -
Does 301 redirect cause penalty
Good Morning, I am considering doing a 301 (permanent) re-direct of roughly 100 domains, split between my 3 main e-commerce sites. Would taking an action like this put any of the 100 domains or any of the 3 recipient domains at risk of violating G's guidelines? Thanks...
Technical SEO | | Prime851 -
One Keyword Penalty
Hi There, Quick question for everyone. Is it possible to get penalized a keyword level not page level. I have a site that only seems to be penalized on one keyword which is currently at page 22, whilst the rest are on page 1 or page 2. I came to the site late so I have no idea when the site lost its ranking for this keyword after a site redesign but the onpage is almost the same. Kind Regards Neil
Technical SEO | | nezona0 -
No improvement from Google penalty despite a lot of work
Hi Everyone, i hope someone can help. Our site www.danbro.co.uk suddenly dropped across all keyphrases and even our brand name on 12th April. We receieved a notification of unnatural link building and so the problem was obvious. Since then we have removed a number of old blog links, forum links that we have built up over a number of years. Once removed we sent a reconsideration. There are still a number of links we are trying (but sometimes to no avail) to remove. It is quite frustrating as we do have a number of high quality links on really relevant sites and we do update our content on a regular basis. Does anyone have any other solutions of what we can be doing? changing the domain name is not an option as it is the brand name. any help is much appreciated
Technical SEO | | Townpages0