How to tell if you have been penalised?
-
Hey Guys,
Something is seriously going on with the SEO on my website and it's become business critical.
We were ranked first on Google for phrases like 'Advertising agency Cambridge' and all of a sudden we have been dropped, not even ranking.
To me this screams a penalisation but I can't understand why. I have never paid for links or done anything out of the ordinary that would get such a negative impact.
Is there a way to check if a site has actually been penalised and find the reason?
What would be the best course of action to appeal?
Has anyone experienced something like this and have a timeframe for resolution?
Thanks,
Gareth
-
I see your homepage is back in the index in Google when I do a site: search, and in google.com it's showing up on the first page for a search of Advertising agency Cambridge from California.
Did you figure out what happened and why you got back in? Or just celebrating that the page is including again? Glad to see it's back in there!
-
Hi,
Yep its all verified, sitemap was all in place, no crawling errors, 301 redirects in place.
Talk about pulling your hair out, how can Google just drop the homepage without any prior warning or error.
Ugh
-
Have you verified your site in Google Webmaster Tools? Google will send you a warning there sometimes if they see something really bad.
-
Very strange.. I find it incredibly bizzare as I haven't done any major SEO work and as you say, it just happened that over the weekend the homepage went.
Perhaps a Google bug or a major reshuffle? I am just struggling to come up with an answer.
-
this is weird. Same thing happened to us (homepage gone, rest ok) over the weekend and I've just seen another thread to the same effect.
Interesting to see how this pans out. Hopefully a temporary rumble
-
Hey,
I see you have a Wordpress Site so your "Home Page" could be called anything. What are you expecting to see as your home page?
Just the domain name I guess.
Of course the actual page you are looking for may be indexed in another name. Maybe take a look at how is your home page created.
Not that helpful. sorry...
-
i have sen this before, it has always come back.
-
Checking site index, everypage is present except for the homepage.
I have never done anything black hat so I am incredibly confused as to why it's been dropped from the index and what I can do to get it reindexed.
Cheers
-
What is the URL of the Home page? Are you certain it's been removed from the index?
try searching in Google for SITE:http://www.YOURHOMEPAGE.com/INDEX-NAME.HTML
Steve
-
After further investigation, it appears to just be the homepage that has been removed.
All other pages are still visible in search results, can anyone help shed some light on this situation with their experience?
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
-
Is there a way to tell if you were doing everything perfectly on the SEO front what your average SERP position and page views could be?
If you had optimised everything 100% on your website (keywords, links, everything), is there some tool or some way to figure out what your average SERP position could be and what volume of traffic you could be getting?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AnnaKot0 -
Can anyone tell me why this page has content wider than screen?
I am getting that error on my product pages. This link is in the errors http://www.wolfautomation.com/drive-accessory-safety-sto-module-i500 but when I look at it on mobile it is fine.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tylerj0 -
Can I tell Google to Ignore Parts of a Page?
Hi all, I was wondering if there was some sort of html trick that I could use to selectively tell a search engine to ignore texts on certain parts of a page. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Charles_Murdock
Charles0 -
How do I tell if competitor's links are good?
One strategy I have seen recommended over and over is to look at your competitor's back links and see if any could be relevant for your site and worth pursuing. My question is how do I evaluate a link and not end up pursuing some penalized site? I would guess checking for Google index is a good idea since some of the webmasters may not be aware they are penalized. Is it DA and whether they are indexed alone? Many sites I have seen have DA in the teens but are legitimate in our industry. Should they not be considered due to low DA? Also I see links from directories on many competitor sites. Seems a controversial subject, but assuming the directory is industry specific, is it OK? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris6610 -
Question on starting again after being penalised for bad links
Hi, in a scenario where you have been heavily penalised for bad links but the quality of your site is good, If you put the exact same version of your penalised site on a new domain (with no redirects), would Google recognise it and penalise it again, or would that give it a completely fresh start? Any advice or experience with this would be much appreciated. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | em_welsby1 -
Do I have to tell WBT site moved to a subdirectory on another internal site?
I am moving content from one site to another and redirecting the DNS from www.oldsite.com to www.newsite.com/old-site. I have put the 301 in place but I wanted to make sure I have to also tell Webmaster Tools to change the old site to the new domain? We still want the old domain name to answer and redirect to www.newsite.com/old-site. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GeorgeLaRochelle0 -
Nobody Can Answer This? What Can Google Tell About Videos?
I uploaded a video to youtube one time and then went to upload it again, but saved differently with different tags. Youtube rejected the second upload as being the same as the first. Really, it was the same... just a different file with different tags. Now, I was thinking about making and uploading some similar but not identical videos for embedding on some web pages. Was thinking I'd make the voice overs different, but the images mostly the same montage. Do you think Youtube/Google will see it as the same video? I kind of assume that it didn't fly when I first tried it some time ago because youtube was looking at the audio in the way it can make a transcription. Do you think if the audi,o, file name, tags were different, it wouldn't matter if the video was the same? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Can your site be penalised by backlinks?
Hi, I just wanted to get some clarification on whether Google would penalize your site if you had many links coming from a questionable site. We've been struggling with rankings for years even though we have one of the oldest sites in the industry with a good link profile and the site is well optimized. I was looking through webmaster tools and noticed that one website links to us over 100,000 times, all to the home page. The site is www.vietnamfuntravel.com. When I looked at the site it seems that they operate a massive links exchange, I'm not sure what the history is and why they link to us so much though. Is there any chance that this could impact us negatively? if it is then what would be the best way to deal with the situation? I could ask them to take the links down but can't guarantee they would do it quickly (if at all). Would blocking their domain from our htaccess file have the desired effect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Maximise0