Website has been penalized?
-
Hey guys,
We have been link building and optimizing our website since the beginning of June 2010.
Around August-September 2010, our site appeared on second page for the keywords we were targeting for around a week. They then dropped off the radar - although we could still see our website as #1 when searching for our company name, domain name, etc. So we figured we had been put into the 'google sandbox' sort of thing. That was fine, we dealt with that.
Then in December 2010, we appeared on the first page for our keywords and maintained first page rankings, even moving up the top 10 for just over a month. On January 13th 2011, we disappeared from Google for all of the keywords we were targeting, we don't even come up in the top pages for company name search. Although we do come up when searching for our domain name in Google and we are being cached regularly.
Before we dropped off the rankings in January, we did make some semi-major changes to our site, changing meta description, changing content around, adding a disclaimer to our pages with click tracking parameters (this is when SEOmoz prompted us that our disclaimer pages were duplicate content) so we added the disclaimer URL to our robots.txt so Google couldn't access it, we made the disclaimer an onclick link instead of href, we added nofollow to the link and also told Google to ignore these parameters in Google Webmaster Central.
We have fixed the duplicate content side of things now, we have continued to link build and we have been adding content regularly.
Do you think the duplicate content (for over 13,000 pages) could have triggered a loss in rankings? Or do you think it's something else? We index pages meta description and some subpages page titles and descriptions. We also fixed up HTML errors signaled in Google Webmaster Central and SEOmoz.
The only other reason I think we could have been penalized, is due to having a link exchange script on our site, where people could add our link to their site and add theirs to ours, but we applied the nofollow attribute to those outbound links.
Any information that will help me get our rankings back would be greatly appreciated!
-
The links on our link exchange script accounted to about 2% of websites total links, most of our link building has been through natural articles and websites posting about us. So even if Google discounted our links via link exchange - this wouldn't of made us drop this much?
I agree with you. That's a very small number and unlikely to be the problem.
The duplicate content issue is fixed.
Excellent!
I have removed the link exchange script.
Good....
Even if I link as www.freemoviedb.com as anchor text, will it still help me rank for my keywords?
Yes, you'll want to keep a number of links out there with your keyword anchor text, as that still has a high effect on ranking for a particular term. But you'll want to present a link profile that has a more natural "mix" of keywords and your domain to avoid getting flagged as spammy.
-
The links on our link exchange script accounted to about 2% of websites total links, most of our link building has been through natural articles and websites posting about us. So even if Google discounted our links via link exchange - this wouldn't of made us drop this much?
The duplicate content issue is fixed.
I have removed the link exchange script.
Even if I link as www.freemoviedb.com as anchor text, will it still help me rank for my keywords?
-
Sure looks like either a penalty or a massive discounting of links to me. You're not banned, but you're way back in the results given your link profile. I took a quick look at your robots.txt and it looks fine.
If Google is still seeing 13,000 pages as duplicate content, this could be the issue as well, as Google's internal "quality score" on your site is not going to be pretty. But giving the number of inbound links you have, I'm much more inclined to think that Google has identified your link exchange script and discounted all links related to that.
There's some discussion out there also on whether you can get dinged for over-optimizing your anchor text. See this article. While that case study is a pretty small number of sites, if Tim's findings are accurate, you're definitely at risk. Both your internal and external links to your home page are virtually 99% "watch movies online" and "watch free movies online".
So here's what I would do:
#1 solve the duplicate content issue
#2 see what you can do to change the link exchange process to make it less recognizable to Google
#3 go vary your anchor text, adding new links and changing a few old ones like this profile link to use www.freemoviedb.com as the anchor text.
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
-
Can you help me figure out why my website is in conflict with guidelines of Google ?
Hi, Since few weeks now we received this message saying that our website is in conflict with the guidelines of Google's Webmaster. Here is the website for which we received the message from Google: http://www.gocustomized.es/. This url redirect to https://www.gocustomized.es/ I thought after reading your some messages from the forum that the problem was our website reviews which appear on all pages of the site. And I know that the review of the websites shouldn't be considered like the review of the product. But we remove the reviews and our request is still declined. Thanks in advance for your help.
Technical SEO | | steph_ba0 -
Do robot.txts permanently affect websites even after they have been removed?
A client has a Wordpress blog to sit alongside their company website. They kept it hidden whilst they were developing what it looked like, keeping it un-searchable by Search Engines. It was still live, but Wordpress put a robots.txt in place. When they were ready they removed the robots.txt by clicking the "allow Search Engines to crawl this site" button. It took a month and a half for their blog to show in Search Engines once the robot.txt was removed. Google is now recognising the site (as a "site:" test has shown) however, it doesn't rank well for anything. This is despite the fact they are targeting keywords with very little organic competition. My question is - could the fact that they developed the site behind a robot.txt (rather than offline) mean the site is permanently affected by the robot.txt in the eyes of the Search Engines, even after that robot.txt has been removed? Thanks in advance for any light you can shed on the situation.
Technical SEO | | Driver720 -
Product meta tags are not updating in my Magneto website!
I need some help! For some reason, each time I update the product meta tags in my Magento website, it doesn't change on the current website? Could someone help me understand why that is?
Technical SEO | | One2OneDigital0 -
Website Redirects
Background information: We have a website (devicelock.com) which is currently our corporate website. The company use to operate under (ntutility.com) which is now being redirected to devicelock.com via a DNS Forward - 302 Redirect. The IT admin (a founder of the company) is reluctant to change it to a 301. The current flow is ntutility.com redirects to protect-me.com then redirects again to devicelock.com. When i search up Devicelock on google, it shows up as ntutlity.com. There is no devicelock.com homepage on google search. Question: Are there any negative implications about this? Is this hurting our SEO in any way? When i do link building, will this have any negative affects? Will my links for devicelock be attributed to devicelock.com?
Technical SEO | | Devicelock0 -
Proper way to 404 a page on an Ecommerce Website
Hello. I am working on a website that has over 15000 products. When one of these is no longer available - like it's discontinued or something - the page it's on 302s to a 404 page. Example - www.greatdomain.com/awesome-widget Awesome widget is no longer available www. greatdomain.com/awesome-widget 302s to -www.greatdomain.com/404 page. For the most part, these are not worthy of 301s because of lack of page rank/suitable LPs, but is this the correct way to handle them for search engines? I've seen varying opinions. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Blenny0 -
Sitemap for dynamic website with over 10,000 pages
If I have a website with thousands of products, is it a good idea to create a sitemap for this website for the search engines where you show maybe 250 products on a page so it makes it easy for the search engine to find the part and also puts that part closer to the home page? Seems like google likes pages that are the closest to the home page (less clicks the better)
Technical SEO | | roundbrix0 -
Hosting in the US for an Australian website
Hi, I was wondering whether it's still important for SEO to host a website in the same country as you're targetting. We host a fair few Australian sites and we're looking for a new webhost at the moment. Should we only consider hosting on Australian servers or is it worth looking at servers elsewhere? One of the main reasons we're thinking about US hosting is that we can get a machine that is 3x more powerful than we can get in Australia for the price. This performance increase should go some way to minimizing the effect of the latency increase. Thanks, Nick
Technical SEO | | MarketingResults0 -
Google Penalize?
Hello, I read an statement somewhere which stated: "2 identical URLs linked to 2 different popular key phrases next to each other (on the same website/domain) will lead to a Google penalize. Google knows, that both terms are popular. This means, Google will ignore the links to your site (you'll not have any benefit) and the site you have your links on loses authority." What are your thoughts on this statement? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | micfo0