I think I have a penalty on my domain...
-
my domain is www.brighttights.com it is an affiliate marketing website in the niche of tights and lingerie. A few months back my traffic was pretty good, doing about 500 hits a day from product search terms only. After the panda updates I blocked all the product pages from google as they were duplicate content and I am now working on a program of seing for the category and homepages instead. I am using much more generic, and high volume, keywords for these.
Several months later I seem to not only be down to 7 people a day on my website but i'm not even ranking for terms such as "bright tights". I used to be no1 for this. I have domain authority of 27 so it's not terrible, competitors on the first page range from 45 to 9. This lack of ranking for the sites name/domain name term is leading me to wonder if I have a penalty on the site.
Any feedback would be gratefully received.
-
Alertra is sharing the text / html load time. It is not loading images, videos, javascript, etc. which can take substantially longer to load. Alertra is an excellent, free tool which can help you understand if page speed issues are related to your server or your web design.
Also understand Alertra is a snapshot of how your site is performing at any individual moment. Site speeds vary greatly throughout the day. If you press the button once/minute, you will likely notice different results.
If your GA shows 4 seconds whereas Alertra shows 1 second, either there are optimization opportunities on your site, or your site offers a lot of images, or the discrepancy is due to random sampling. I have used the tool quite a lot and find it to be useful.
-
Google Analytics says that one of my client's load time is 4 seconds. Alertra says it is 1 second in the USA. I don't think Alertra is accurate.
-
Have you verified your site with Google Webmaster Tools and looked recently for any alerts about your site? Google will often tell you there if it has found something wrong, and you can get some more clues about what is happening to your site.
-
Regarding the site speed, I use Alertra to check site speed from various points throughout the world. Your server responds in about 2.5 seconds in London. The page loads slowly because the site design is horrible. Your PageSpeed score is 20 which is the lowest I have ever seen or even heard of for a live site.
You do not presently rank in the top 50 for "bright tights" in Google.co.uk. Assuming you did not geographically target your site to another country, this would indicate a penalty.
Your home page has 64 validation errors, you have blocked Google from almost all the links on your home page, your page load speed is really bad, etc. There are many issues which need to be addressed in order for this site to rank properly.
-
Sorry, related to the above...does the site seem slow to other users? I have moved it from a Netherland dedicated server to a UK VPS to try and see if that would help with the rankings in Google UK but all it seems to have done is slow the site down
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
-
Old Redirected Domain is replacing my current domain on SERPs
Hello everyone, All of a sudden a 2 year old redirected domain is replacing my current domain for 2 weeks now, my site is apitus.com and my old domain is aptitus.pe (the redirect is still working), however this only happens on my country google results (google.com.pe), if you check my site on google.com, everything looks ok even with a sitelink, which I no longer have on my country search results. Back to the issue, the first thing I thought was go to Search Console and take it out from the index, so I asked for access by uploading a file but since everything on that old site redirects to my current site I can't make such action. While still waiting for such access, is there anything else I could do?. Thanks in advance. PD: I'm adding the images of my SERPs CmzN8kY G3zZwwj
Technical SEO | | JoaoCJ0 -
How can you promote a sub-domain ahead of a domain on the SERPs?
I have a new client that wants to promote their subdomain uk.imagemcs.com and have their main domain imagemcs.com fall off the SERPs. Objective? Get uk.imagemcs.com to rank first for UK 'brand' searches. Do a search for 'imagem creative services' and you should see the issue (it looks like rules have been applied to the robots.txt on the main domain to exclude any bots from crawling - but since they've been indexed previously I need to take action as it doesn't look great!). I think I can do this by applying a permanent redirect from the main domain to the subdomain at domain level and then no-indexing the site - and then resubmit the sitemap. My slight concern is that this no-indexing of the main domain may impact on the visibility of the subdomains (I'm dealing with uk.imagemcs.com, but there is us.imagemcs.com and de.imagemcs.com) and was looking for some assurance that this would not be the case. My understanding is that subdomains are completely distinct from domains and as such this action should have no impact on the subdomains. I asked the question on the Webmasters Forum but haven't really got anywhere
Technical SEO | | nathangdavidson2
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/webmasters/1Avupy3Uw_o/hu6oLQntCAAJ Can anyone suggest a course of action? many thanks, Nathan0 -
Are domain variations hurting our rank?
Hi, I have a client who registered many different variations of their domain name, that are pointing to the website. Now I see that many high value links are not linking to the main domain, but a hyphen variation. So when the main domain is something like www.brandservicename.com The links go to www.brand-service-name.com I suppose they should change all those links (if possible), but does it really make a difference? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | alism0 -
Moving from www.domain.com/nameofblog to www.domain.com/blog
Describe your question in detail. The more information you give, the better! It helps give context for a great answer I have had my blog located at www.legacytravel.com/ramblings for a while. I now believe that, from an SEO perspective, it would be preferable to move it to www.legacytravel.com/blog. So, I want to be able to not lose any links (few though they may be) with the move. I believe I would need to do a 301 redirect in the htaccess file of www.legacytravel.com that will tell anyone who comes knocking on the door of www.legacytravel.com/ramblings/blah blah blah that now what they want is at www.legacytravel.com/blog/blah blah blah Is that correct? What would the entry look like in the htaccess? Thank you in advance.
Technical SEO | | cathibanks0 -
Confirmation of penalty
Hi, I have been discussing with friends about possible penalties on few domains [listed below]. I would appreciate if any of seomoz staff could check them and explain if these sites are penalized in full, or part of these websites are penalized or homepage being penalized, any identification of penalty being imposed, and how to get these sites restored. http://www.google.com.pk/#sclient=psy-ab&q=123businesslistings.com&oq=123businesslistings.com&gs_l=hp.3...4797.4797.1.5047.1.1.0.0.0.0.0.0..0.0...0.0...1c.1.8.psy-ab.xDG3ytsYUVU&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_qf.&bvm=bv.45107431,d.aWc&fp=db751f8c4669b6fe&biw=1441&bih=603 keyword searched=123businesslistings.com
Technical SEO | | ClaudioJudsoni0 -
Impact of moving all the domain from .net to .com
Hi, We are thinking of moving a domain from a .net extension to a .com because of internal political reason. It's a french website with 3 000 pages.The organic trafic is 65 % from France and 35 % from Canada. We have decent rankings and we have around 150 000 organic visits/month. For sure,if we move the site, we will do all the rigth 301 redirect. We will also use Google Webmaster Tools to tell the new location of the site. But even if we do all the best practices. What would be the impact of changing the extension. Is anyone had some experience with this ? I will really like to have your opinion on this. Thanks Rick
Technical SEO | | Adviso0 -
Geolocation has changed targeted domains, or has it?
I am monitoring two domains; a .com and a .com.au in quite a competitive sector (men's underwear online sales) last month the .com site completely dropped from rankings sight in Google International SERPs but, the .com.au site is actually ranking (quite respectively too) in the International/US Google SERPs. I have no idea how, when or why but it's now been the case for two months. Help please?
Technical SEO | | Vovia0 -
External Links from own domain
Hi all, I have a very weird question about external links to our site from our own domain. According to GWMT we have 603,404,378 links from our own domain to our domain (see screen 1) We noticed when we drilled down that this is from disabled sub-domains like m.jump.co.za. In the past we used to redirect all traffic from sub-domains to our primary www domain. But it seems that for some time in the past that google had access to crawl some of our sub-domains, but in december 2010 we fixed this so that all sub-domain traffic redirects (301) to our primary domain. Example http://m.jump.co.za/search/ipod/ redirected to http://www.jump.co.za/search/ipod/ The weird part is that the number of external links kept on growing and is now sitting on a massive number. On 8 April 2011 we took a different approach and we created a landing page for m.jump.co.za and all other requests generated 404 errors. We added all the directories to the robots.txt and we also manually removed all the directories from GWMT. Now 3 weeks later, and the number of external links just keeps on growing: Here is some stats: 11-Apr-11 - 543 747 534 12-Apr-11 - 554 066 716 13-Apr-11 - 554 066 716 14-Apr-11 - 554 066 716 15-Apr-11 - 521 528 014 16-Apr-11 - 515 098 895 17-Apr-11 - 515 098 895 18-Apr-11 - 515 098 895 19-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 20-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 21-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 26-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 27-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 28-Apr-11 - 603 404 378 I am now thinking of cleaning the robots.txt and re-including all the excluded directories from GWMT and to see if google will be able to get rid of all these links. What do you think is the best solution to get rid of all these invalid pages. moz1.PNG moz2.PNG moz3.PNG
Technical SEO | | JacoRoux0