Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
So What On My Site Is Breaking The Google Guidelines?
-
I have a site that I'm trying to rank for the Keyword "Jigsaw Puzzles"
I was originally ranked around #60 or something around there and then all of a sudden my site stopped ranking for that keyword. (My other keyword rankings stayed)
Contacted Google via the site reconsideration and got the general response...
So I went through and deleted as many links as I could find that I thought Google may not have liked... heck, I even removed links that I don't think I should have JUST so I could have this fixed.
I responded with a list of all links I removed and also any links that I've tried to remove, but couldn't for whatever reasons.
They are STILL saying my website is breaking the Google guidelines... mainly around links.
Can anyone take a peek at my site and see if there's anything on the site that may be breaking the guidelines? (because I can't)
Website in question: http://www.yourjigsawpuzzles.co.uk
UPDATE:
Just to let everyone know that after multiple reconsideration requests, this penalty has been removed.
They stated it was a manual penalty.
I tried removing numerous different types of links but they kept saying no, it's still breaking rules.
It wasn't until I removed some website directory links that they removed this manual penalty.
Thought it would be interesting for some of you guys.
-
Great new Rhys!
-
Just to let everyone know that after multiple reconsideration requests, this penalty has been removed.
They stated it was a manual penalty.
I tried removing numerous different types of links but they kept saying no, it's still breaking rules.
It wasn't until I removed some website directory links that they removed this manual penalty.
Thought it would be interesting for some of you guys.
-
Potentially quicker to rank well if you built back up on a fresh domain with no poor history, but that being said, whose not to know if Google have methods in place to identify if domain owners do this - potentially via comparing content, code and copy. You might end up redoing everything on your website just to be safe.
Sticking with the same domain just means that you have to build a relatively significant amount of natural links to bring down the same anchor text ratio vs total external backlinks in the profile - do-able though if you subscribe to a few blogs and regularly comment to articles and maybe write some content for publication at toy (or other related) blogs - ensuring that you avoid blog rings/link networks/farms though.
-
In a situation like list, on a fairly new domain would it be quicker to start from scratch on a new domain?
-
View your link profile here.
Links are mostly coming from unauthoritative sources and mostly contain the same anchor text. This will be what you have to work on, start building natural links with varying anchor text to counterweight the poor link profile and history on your domain.
-
Sounds like you are an excellent candidate for some fun Memes attempting to gain socical traction!
-
Hi Rhys,
I agree with everything that Alan stated regarding existing links.
Moving forward, I'd suggest the following:
- Add the ability for customers to share your products socially. I don't see any social media icons on any of the pages, especially the product pages. Add FB, Twitter, Pinterest, Google Plus.
- Do you have social media accounts for your site? If not, create the 4 above and start posting! You'll get more of a sense of community and people will be able to share what puzzles they've completed, which ones they want to purchase next etc. I'm not personally in to puzzles but I know people that are, and they can't wait to get their next one as soon as they finish one.
- Highlight your competitive advantage more (on the item template, page titles etc). What makes you stand out? Free shipping? (BTW really really confusing having two free shipping points in dollars and pounds), best customer service, fast shipping, the latest puzzles etc.) Give people a reason to shop with you.
- You've got reviews but none of the products I viewed had any reviews. I'd suggest emailing customers 3-4 weeks after purchase asking for reviews if you don't already. This would also tie in nicely with a social media pages. Reviews are great for original content.
- Your blog has no entries and is dated from 2010? This doesn't look great...
- If you're struggling to get good/unique content on the site try adding more pictures/videos/staff testimonials/staff favourites etc.
Hope some of that helps
-
"When you factor in hundreds of links on every page" - I don't really see how I could reduce the amount of links on a page? As it's an eCommerce based website there nothing on there that I can see that would be helpful to remove?
"almost no depth of content" - Yeah, this is a problem we've run into. The problem is that a jigsaw puzzle of a cat, is exactly that. There's not much more you can add "content" wise. Even if you try and force extra content out, the most we can get is "this cat looks like he's relaxing in the garden shed."
"the ability to find products through several paths" - I don't think we can really change this, as the products really do fall under multiple categories. We've done Canacolization.
-
A quick review in Open Site Explorer shows that since you apparently don't have a huge volume of links, there's way too many coming from blatantly spam based domains: wywlinks.com, onelinkseo.com, contentrichdirectory.com, organisedlinks.com, yourlinkmarket.com, regularseo.com, elaboratedirectory.com, greatindexdirectory.com, linksmaximum.com, directorysuper.com, gatewayoflinks.com....
Even if you've cleared some of these out, the overall picture is that no great effort was put into obtaining high quality off-site signals- that it was an attempt to game the Google system. Since you say you've done what you could to remove links, it's possible that I'm looking at a "before" snapshot from within OSE, so I can't definitively say this is the issue, but it sure smells like it.
From there, when you factor in hundreds of links on every page, and almost no depth of content, the ability to find products through several paths (leading in duplication issues), the site gives the appearance of being "link polluted" both inbound and on-site.
So I'd say clear out all the links you can from directories. Dramatically reduce the on-site link structure, and if you want multiple paths to products, block some of those from indexing.
Then work to get more depth of descriptive text content on your category pages, and work to get high quality off-site recognition.
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
-
Site Migration - Pagination
Hi, We are migrating our website and an issue we are facing is how to handle paginated content in our categories. Our new website will have the same structure but with different urls. Should we 301 redirect all the paginated content (if crawled by Google) to the url of the main category? To put this into an example: Old urls: www.example.com/technology/tvs (main category of TVs & also page 1) ** www.example.com/technology/tvs?v=0&page=2 ** ( page 2 of TVs) New urls: **www.example.com/soundvision/tvs **(main category of TVs & also page 1) **www.example.com/soundvision/tvs?page=2 **(page 2 of tvs) Should we redirect all of the old TV urls (also the paginated) to www.example.com/soundvision/tvs ? The is no rel next, prev tag in our site and no canonicals. Also there is a view all products page in each category, BUT it doesn't contain all the products(max. is 100 per page - yes the view all page is also paginated). The same view all products page (paginated) will exist in the new website also. I checked google search console, and Google has decided to treat as canonical page the first page www.example.com/technology/tvs . Also, all the organic traffic of our categories goes to these pages (main category page - 1st page). I would appreciate any thoughts on this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HellasSITES0 -
Breaking up a site into multiple sites
Hi, I am working on plan to divide up mid-number DA website into multiple sites. So the current site's content will be divided up among these new sites. We can't share anything going forward because each site will be independent. The current homepage will change to just link out to the new sites and have minimal content. I am thinking the websites will take a hit in rankings but I don't know how much and how long the drop will last. I know if you redirect an entire domain to a new domain the impact is negligible but in this case I'm only redirecting parts of a site to a new domain. Say we rank #1 for "blue widget" on the current site. That page is going to be redirected to new site and new domain. How much of a drop can we expect? How hard will it be to rank for other new keywords say "purple widget" that we don't have now? How much link juice can i expect to pass from current website to new websites? Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | timdavis0 -
SEO on Jobs sites: how to deal with expired listings with "Google for Jobs" around
Dear community, When dealing with expired job offers on jobs sites from a SEO perspective, most practitioners recommend to implement 301 redirects to category pages in order to keep the positive ranking signals of incoming links. Is it necessary to rethink this recommendation with "Google for Jobs" is around? Google's recommendations on how to handle expired job postings does not include 301 redirects. "To remove a job posting that is no longer available: Remove the job posting from your sitemap. Do one of the following: Note: Do NOT just add a message to the page indicating that the job has expired without also doing one of the following actions to remove the job posting from your sitemap. Remove the JobPosting markup from the page. Remove the page entirely (so that requesting it returns a 404 status code). Add a noindex meta tag to the page." Will implementing 301 redirects the chances to appear in "Google for Jobs"? What do you think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grnjbs07175 -
Is Chamber of Commerce membership a "paid" link, breaking Google's rules?
Hi guys, This drives me nuts. I hear all the time that any time value is exchanged for a link that it technically violates Google's guidelines. What about real organizations, chambers of commerce, trade groups, etc. that you are a part of that have online directories with DO-follow links. On one hand people will say these are great links with real value outside of search and great for local SEO..and on the other hand some hardliners are saying that these technically should be no-follow. Thoughts???
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley0 -
Ranking on google but not Bing?
Any reason why I could be ranking for Google but not Bing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edward-may0 -
Moving to a new site while keeping old site live
For reasons I won't get into here, I need to move most of my site to a new domain (DOMAIN B) while keeping every single current detail on the old domain (DOMAIN A) as it is. Meaning, there will be 2 live websites that have mostly the same content, but I want the content to appear to search engines as though it now belongs to DOMAIN B. Weird situation. I know. I've run around in circles trying to figure out the best course of action. What do you think is the best way of going about this? Do I simply point DOMAIN A's canonical tags to the copied content on DOMAIN B and call it good? Should I ask sites that link to DOMAIN A to change their links to DOMAIN B, or start fresh and cut my losses? Should I still file a change of address with GWT, even though I'm not going to 301 redirect anything?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kdaniels0 -
Regional and Global Site
We have numerous versions of what is basically the same site, that targets different countries, such as United States, United Kingdom, South Africa. These websites use Tlds to designate the region, for example, co.uk, co.za I believe this is sufficient (with a little help from Google Webmastertools) to convince the search engines what site is for what region. My question is how do we tell the search engines to send traffic from other regions besides the above to our global site, which would have a .com TLD. For example, we don't have a Brazilian site, how do we drive traffic from Brazil to our global .com site? Many thanks, Jason
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Clickmetrics0 -
Why does a site have no domain authority?
A website was built and launched eight months ago, and their domain authority is 1. When a site has been live for a while and has such a low DA, what's causing it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | optimalwebinc0