Need advice on overcoming a Google penalty
-
Here is the situation. Our website for our primary product (www.thetablift.com) has received a penalty by Google. Not long ago we had excellent rankings; (1st page) for some of our primary keywords, like "tablet stand". Now we are not in the index at all.
Here is what happened (or at least what seems to have happened in my non-SEO opinion). Around October 2016, we had the "bright" idea to try and emulate a campaign that Eat 24 did, utilizing inexpensive traffic from advertisements on porn websites. The idea was a play on a joke we often hear about our product being perfect for certain activities where one needs to free one's hands while watching a screen. Of course this is not how we market our product (it is a best selling mainstream product), but we wanted to see if we could emulate the success of another mainstream brand that utilized this kind of non-mainstream advertising.
The immediate result was a whole lot of traffic, but obviously the wrong kind, as it did not convert. So we pulled the plug after about 3 days. Flash forward several months later and we not only lost our great SEO rankings, but we were removed from Google's index entirely. I assume the reason for this is that somehow the website got dinged for being somehow related to porn. But of course it has nothing to do with that.
So the question is: how do we go about getting un-penalized by Google? We had build up some solid SEO over the previous couple of years, and I'd like to get back to where we were, if possible. Oh, and this may or may not be relevant, but we also switched from www.tablift.com to www.thetablift.com a few months before we did this campaign. However, we used permanent redirects and did a textbook changeover, so I don't think that had any bearing. But I can't be sure.
What are the steps to reverse this damage, if any? Thanks!
-
Done, thank you!
-
Yes, you'll need to remove it.
In WordPress, if you go to Settings > Reading, it's most likely that your developer has left the box checked that says "Discourage search engines from indexing this site".
Uncheck that box and you should be all good.
Cheers,
David
-
One other thing: should this tag be removed altogether? Thanks!
-
Holy cow, thank you!! I will do that ASAP. I had no idea that tag was in there, nor do I know how it got there! Thanks again.
-
David's right if your right click 'view page source' in chrome you will see:
This tag appears on every page of the site.
Remove the tag but also check the backlink profile and check you are not listed in a load of dodgy low DA directories. It may highlight any other issues you may have.
-
Nothing to do with a penalty. Nothing to do with negative SEO.
The problem here is that your site is noindexed...
Remove the meta robots noindex and I'd say you'll start to see your site ranking again.
Cheers,
David
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
-
How to get visibility in Google Discover?
Hey everyone, I run a website that publish articles about pets. I have read some great things about Google Discover and the potential traffic it can bring to publishers (Condé Nast reported up to 20% of traffic coming from Discover in the US, at a certain point). I am currently trying to get indexed and after reading Google guidelines and a Ahrefs guide, I have made many optimizations to my site: structured data, creating an author page, fixing image size and publishing date... so far, it's not working. I feel the lack of a knowledge graph for my business may affect my chances. I'm currently building a GMB page to fix this. Do you have other recommendations or success stories of your own experiments with Discover? An example of an article I tried to get indexed was https://www.lebernard.ca/teletravail-chien-guide-survie/. Obviously, I'm not expecting feedback on the quality of the content since it's in French, but I'm curious if you see anything from a technical perspective that doesn't work. Thanks a lot for your help! Charles
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cheebee1240 -
Doorway page penalty
Has Google changed their interpretation of Doorway pages?We do not sell widgets but allow me to use Widget for this example;If we sold 25 very different widgets an online vendor would typically have 1 "mother" website with 25 different inner pages, each page to explain each type of widget they sell.However, for the past 9 years our approach is to have 25 different websites, one for each widget. With these 25 sites we concentrated on ranking the home page only . All these sites link back to our (No idexed) "Mother' site via no follow links where we have our Shopping Cart and Terms of Business. We did this partly to avoid having 25 separate Shopping Carts and to avoid having to change our Terms 25 times each time that became necessary. But yes we also did this as it was so much easier to rank each different type of widget in the SERPS. Also we think its a better user experience as in our business buyers of yellow widgets will not be interested in blue widgetsWe have been reading for years that google does not like doorways pages but we were not 100% certain if they might regard our sites as such .This is because our approach has worked great for nine years. That is until December last year when all 95% our sites fell dramatically in the SERPS usually from page 1 to page 2 or 3. First thing we did was to go through all our sites and search for the obvious; toxic links, duplicate content, keyword density, https issues, mobility issues, anchor text, etc etc and of course content. We found no obvious problems that could affect 95% of the sites at the same time but we ordered new homepage content for most of our sites from expert seo writers. However, after putting on this new content 3 -4 weeks ago our sites have not moved up the SERPS at all.So we are left with the inescapable conclusion that our problem is because google sees and devalues our sites as doorway pages especially as 95% of your sites have been affected all at the same time Would any SEO experts on this forum agree or be able to offer an opinion?If so, what might be the solution going forward? We have 2 solutions under consideration;1) Remove all links from each of our 25 sites to our "mother Site" and put a shopping cart and our TOS on each of the 25 sites so they are all truly independent stand alone websites.2) Create 25 inner pages on our mother site (after removing the no index) , for each of the 25 widgets we sell , then 301 each of the 25 individual sites home pages to its inner page on the mother site . I think this might be the best solution partly as almost all of our higher ranking competitors are ranking their inner pages not their homepage. But I worry if these 25 sites will really pass much link juice if they have been devalued by Google.?Any advice will be gratefully received.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | apcsilver90 -
301 redirection help needed!
Hi all, So if we used to have a domain (let's say olddomain.com) and we had a new site created at newdomain.com how do we properly setup redirects page to page. Caveat, the urls have changed so for instance the old page oldomain.com/service is now newdomain.com/our-services on the new site. Do we need to have hosting on the old site? Do we need to setup individual 301s for each page corresponding to the new page? Just looking for the easiest way to do this CORRECTLY. Thanks, Ricky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley3 -
Does having all client websites on same server/same Google Analytics red flag Google?
If you have several clients, and they are all on the same server, and also under ONE Google Analytics account, will that negatively impact with Google? They all have different content and addresses, some have the same template, but with different images.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BBuck1 -
Why will Google not remove a manual penalty against us?
Our site was placed under a manual penalty last year in June 2012 after penguin rolled out. We were advised by Google that we had unnatural links pointing to our site. We fought for months, running backlink checks and contacting webmasters where Google's WMT was showing the sites which had links. We have submitted numerous reconsideration requests with proof of our efforts in the form of huge well labeled spreadsheets, emails, and screen shots of online forms requesting link removal.When the disavow tool came out we thought it was a godsend and added all the sites who had either ignored us or refused to take down the links to the disavow.txt with the domain: tag. Then we submitted another reconsideration request, but to no avail.We have since had email correspondence with a member of the Google Quality Search Team who after reviewing the evidence of all our previous reconsideration requests and disavow.txt still advised us to make a genuine effort and listed sites which had inorganic links pointing to our site which were already included in the disavow.txt.Google has stated "In order for your site to have a successful reconsideration request, we will need to see a substantial, good-faith effort to remove the links, and this effort should result in a significant decrease in the number of bad links that we see."We have truly done everything we can and proven it too! Especially with all the sites in the disavow.txt there must be a decrease in links pointing to our site. What more can we do? Please help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Benbug0 -
Google Places
If you rank on google places, I have noticed that you do not rank on the front page as well. I have a site that ranks on front page for it's keywords; however, because they are (1) on google places, they don't show up when someone is localized to that area. They show up on google places but not on front page. If you turn of localization, they are first in serps. How can I get around this? Two separate sites? One for Google+ (Places) and one for SERPS?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JML11790 -
Google indexing issue?
Hey Guys, After a lot of hard work, we finally fixed the problem on our site that didn't seem to show Meta Descriptions in Google, as well as "noindex, follow" on tags. Here's my question: In our source code, I am seeing both Meta descriptions on pages, and posts, as well as noindex, follow on tag pages, however, they are still showing the old results and tags are also still showing in Google search after about 36 hours. Is it just a matter of time now or is something else wrong?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ttb0 -
GOOGLE Rankings
We built a site for one of our clients about 3 years ago and added Meta tags to each page of the site. But when you do a google search on the keywords the site still does not come up. I thought it would be spidered into the system by now. Web Site - www.specialtysealgroup.com Let me know what we can do to improve our GOOGLE rankings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | thine1230